BOOKS

John Murray, 2007

James Hamilton will be at the Edinburgh International Literature Festival on Tuesday 12 August talking about London Lights and the John Murray Archive. More information >>

‘Hamilton’s wonderful gallop through 40 of London’s finest years is impressively researched, somewhat romantic, enjoyable and engrossing. It is, I have to say it, decidedly illuminating book.’
Michael Moorcock, Daily Telegraph

'well-written, intelligent and entertainingly instructive'
Philip Ziegler, The Spectator

‘What a wonderful book … Read it and enjoy’
BBC Focus

‘This book … perfectly encapsulates one of the most industrious and creative periods in the city’s history … It is effectively the biography of half a century and … a vivid account of why not only London but Britain as a whole was once top dog.’
The Londonist

‘This hugely entertaining book … The author writes with a passion for his subject that is contagious. We are in awe of the research he must have done and the way he brings it to life.’
Ryedale Gazette and Herald

‘London Lights is rich in detail, a proverbial plum pudding of a book … The vitality of the time is caught brilliantly.’
Publishing News

Teeming with characters, incident and ideas, this vibrant narrative offers a fresh and original perspective on artistic and scientific London in the Regency and early Victorian periods.

Turner - A Life

Hodder and Stoughton, 1997 [Spectre paperback]
US, Random House, 2002, paperback edition, 2007

‘A richly detailed biography … Hamilton maintains a steady course between academic respectability and an allowance for the drama and poignancy so clearly central to an accurate portrait of his subject’
Los Angeles Times

 

J. M. W. Turner, the greatest painter of landscape the world has ever known, exhibited his work proudly but was correspondingly reticent about his private life. In 1799, aged 24, he became an Associate of the Royal Academy at the youngest possible age, and, with a high awareness of his own worth and entrepreneurial cunning, demanded and achieved the highest prices. While influential collectors competed to buy his paintings, Turner travelled widely in Britain and Europe, observing the landscape and the people, and collecting material for a cycle of images that would be engraved, circulated widely and come to express the collective identity of Britain.

In this lucid blend of vibrant biography and acute art history, James Hamilton introduces Turner to a new generation of readers. Hamilton scotches many Turner myths – his ‘meanness’, his ‘reclusiveness’ – and paints a picture of a uniquely generous human being, a giant of the nineteenth-century and a beacon for the twenty-first.

Faraday – The Life

HarperCollins, 2002; US, Random House, 2004

‘Faraday could not have had a better biographer … comprehensive, lucid, unfailingly intelligent.’ Financial Times

Michael Faraday is one of the giants of the history of science. A self-made, self-educated man, his public life was underpinned by his devout membership of a small Christian sect, whose rigid attitudes shadowed him at every turn, culminating in a crisis that tested his resolve as a scientist, his faith as a Christian and even the balance of his mind. Yet he became the greatest scientist of his day, and the central figure of an extraordinary scientific renaissance in London. At the age of 21 Faraday secured a position as laboratory assistant to Sir Humphry Davy at the Royal Institution. He rapidly overtook Davy as Britain’s most celebrated scientist, and his work at the Institution as a gifted experimenter and inspiring lecturer gave unprecedented impetus to public understanding of science over the course of nearly half a century.

Faraday – The Life captures the excitement of the explosive mixture of scientific and other cultural activity in London during the first half of the nineteenth century, and radically reshapes our perceptions not only of Michael Faraday, but of the interaction of arts, sciences and education at the dawn of the modern age.

‘Full of rich and fascinating material … Hamilton’s biography humanises Faraday, and sets him convincingly in the context of Romanticism’ Lisa Jardine, The Times.

James Hamilton's other books include:

Arthur Rackham
(Pavilion, 1990)
‘With this scholarly, sumptuous and delightful book, James Hamilton has done Rackham proud.’ New York Review of Books

William Heath Robinson
(Pavilion, 1992)
‘An affectionate and painstaking pictorial life of a rare comic artist whose work delights readers of all ages.’ Observer

Wood Engraving and the Woodcut in Britain c1890-1990
(Barrie and Jenkins, 1994)
‘The best book yet written on the art of this century’ Alan Powers, Interiors

The Sculpture of Austin Wright
(Lund Humphries and the Henry Moore Foundation, 1994)
Short-listed for the Yorkshire Post Book of the Year Award, 1994

Hughie O’Donoghue – Painting, Memory, Myth
(Merrell, 2003)

Louis le Brocquy – Homage to his Masters
(Gimpel Fils, 2006)

The Paintings of Ben McLaughlin
(Merrell, 2006)

György Gordon: Portraits and Figurative Work 1956-1993
Huddersfield Art Gallery, and the National Portrait Gallery, 1994-95