On Photography

"Esther Leslie soars where many of her contemporaries fall flat. In On Photography: Walter Benjamin, Leslie has produced an attractive, erudite, readable yet sophisticated work on Benjamin . . . Leslies stellar work may be described as comprising the most comprehensive treatment thus far of Benjamins engagement with photography . . . Leslie provides a substantial overview of Benjamin followed by short introductions to his diverse writings about photography, both published and unpublished. One of the novel features of this book is Leslies fine translation of Benjamins Short History of Photography (1931), which overlaps many of the ideas in his more famous work of art essay . . . Esther Leslies next turn in Walter Benjamin scholarship is to focus on him as storyteller, which is likely to yield books and articles at least as superb as her current work on Benjamin and photography." - Jewish Quarterly
"Bjørn Berge offers us a treasure trove of insight and reflection. The text sharpens your senses and makes you appreciate the endless variety the world has to offer, which powerful forces are recklessly striving to flatten, homogenize, and standardize." - Dagbladet
"Katherine Mansfield: A Hidden Lifeby Gerri Kimber is a sensitive and scholarly account of the fiercely independent life of the modernist writer whose talent was the envy of Virginia Woolf." - Fiona Sturges, The Guardian: Best Biographies of 2025
"This lively account retrieves the life and career of Annibale Carracci, an innovative but elusive painter who shared baroque Rome with Caravaggio. Alongside reconstruction of the artist’s varied oeuvre, a rich reading of verbal texts builds a portrait of a distinctive man whose work featured invention, naturalism, family collaboration, and succinct moral authority." - Elizabeth S. Cohen, Professor Emerita of History, York University, Toronto
"In this lively and deeply researched volume that melds biography and historiography, F. M. Gage brilliantly evokes the life and work of the ‘universal’ painter Annibale Carracci. Foregrounding, through the writings of contemporaries and biographers, the artist’s independence, intelligence, and ingenuity, Gage perceptively discusses the joys and rivalries of Annibale’s ambient in both Bologna and Rome, and skillfully documents the evolution of the critical fortune of one of Italy’s most significant artists." - Andria Derstine, Virginia N. and Randall J. Barbato Deputy Director and Chief Curator, Cleveland Museum of Art, and co-author of Masters of Italian Baroque Painting: The Detroit Institute of Arts
"A literary treasure trove on the subject of smell, this book explores the sense of smell with a broad perspective . . . We learn how security, ruin, bliss, fear, longing and lust can smell – and even nothingness has a scent." - Gerfried Pongratz, Spektrum der Wissenschaft
"As Gerri Kimber writes in her fascinating new biography, Mansfield possessed ‘a supreme gift for storytelling that has never been equalled’ . . . Kimber is an authority on Mansfield’s life and work." - The Spectator
"A brilliant digest of Benjamins life . . . It draws on a mass of texts, including his accounts of a privileged Berlin upbringing and travel diaries. [Leslie] presents a definitive portrait of Benjamin the materialist, lingers on his obsession with childrens books, and makes excellent use of German sources to detail his movements and finances." - The Independent
"Kimber, whose prodigious scholarship (often in collaboration with others) has given us Mansfield’s letters and poems as well as unedited versions of the collected fiction and of archival discoveries that tell us more about her sexuality and relationships. In 2016 she published an account of Mansfield’s early life; now we have this full, studious biography, whose claims rest on complexity and nuance, on hidden facts over rumour." - Sophie Oliver, Literary Review
"In his remarkable book Berge begins with a silent revolt: against the primacy of the visual, against the neglect of the atmospheric, against a world that limits itself to talking and showing. [This book is] a philosophy of the atmospheric. An attention to that which does not shout, yet endures." - Fairewirtschaft.de (Fair Market Economy)
"With some new material shedding light on Mansfield’s key personal relationships and a fine appreciation of her literary technique, this is an essential contribution to Mansfield scholarship, not to mention a fascinating read for general audiences." - Library Journal
"Kimber's own new research about Mansfield's relationships and friendships is a welcome addition to understanding her life." - Fine Books & Collections
"This is a glorious treat for all Katherine Mansfield enthusiasts. It’s a painstakingly researched and stylishly told account of Mansfield’s tempestuous life, with much new information, and a sensitive analysis of her brilliant short stories." - Dame Jacqueline Wilson
"Kimber, who has long been at the centre of the Mansfield world, chose her title well . . . [and] has restored valuable detail to Mansfield’s intimate life. Crucially, she has done so without ever losing sight of the writing . . . For, no doubt, Mansfield was a writer of the hidden life, those areas of experience that often go unseen: domestic spaces, the puzzling movements of the human mind and the feeling of one’s life being transformed in what she called “the blazing moment”." - The Tablet
"With its new findings, Katherine Mansfield: A Hidden Life transforms our understandings of Mansfield and of modernism. A world expert on Katherine Mansfield, Gerri Kimber has extensively researched the fascinating entanglements of Mansfield’s life to produce a biography like no other." - Maggie Humm, author of The Bloomsbury Photographs
"Gerri Kimber’s much-anticipated biography is one of those once-in-a-decade books that promises to shift by significant degrees our understanding of this leading modernist’s short but intensely lived creative life. Mansfield steps from the pages of Kimber’s carefully researched account in a fresh combination of roles. A Hidden Life also gives us a Mansfield who was not only an innovator of the modernist short story, but also a pioneer in the now boom genre of fictionalised life-writing." - Elleke Boehmer, novelist, Professor of World Literature in English, University of Oxford, and Patron of the Katherine Mansfield Society
"What we often think of as experimental fiction, usually considered as part of Modernism at the end of the 19th Century and into the 20th, would not have happened without Katherine Mansfield . . . Gerri Kimber embeds her readings of Mansfield’s stories within a fairly traditional biography, but she is keen to emphasise originality and innovation." - International Times
"You will find [the Mansfield story] here in its brilliant light and terrible shadow, its weird Kiwi mix of the banal and the marvellous." - New Zealand Listener
"[The book] provides a wealth of new material and insights . . . [Kimber] is good at making connections, at filling out and tightening the narrative. Readings of the stories often provide information when other sources are missing . . . Katherine Mansfield: A Hidden Life expands the Mansfield story, and gives us a writer who is feisty, sexually adventurous, confounded in her ‘messy life’ by disasters of her own making, experiencing extremes of despair and wild exultation, and finally, impressively, making her own reckoning." - Emeritus Professor Janet Wilson, Katherine Mansfield Society Newsletter