Art, Design, Craft, Beauty and All Those Things…

Responding to many recent calls for redress and restitution, Richardson summarises the historical and current situation and attributes its problematics to the fact that theorists and historians have taken the concept art as a generic that includes both design and craft – which are actually and validly distinguishable from art by application of the concept function/al ­– or else ignored the two entirely. Considering the concept function/al, he maintains, calls into question the view that the three may be sub-classes of the one class: whereas in a work of art, typically there is a resolution of the tension between form and content, in works of design and craft the resolution is between form and function. How this recognition can clarify the issue informs the entire book.

The book’s other major thesis is the realisation that aesthetic values are inherently human and that, therefore, they apply not only to art but to life in general. Far from being frivolous or a mere ‘emotion’, the aesthetic is a sense of equivalent psychic status to sight and hearing ­and, like them, is employed at almost every moment of our daily lives – which fact grounds art, design and craft deeply in human life. This is reflected in the universal use of the human form (including the exhibition of sexual characteristics) in art.

The eternal conflict between making art and making a living from making art is examined and contrasted to the rarely-recognised, but positive, role of design in planning and industry.

Richardson also critiques common theories of representation and composition, including ‘creativity’, Albertian perspective and scientific and geometric theories of beauty and composition; also the relevance of the camera and the computer in the field.

Baba’s Bites

Baba’s Bites

Simplified Vegan Cooking with an Ayurvedic Twist

NATURAL – VEGAN – AYURVEDIC – SEASONAL

Embark on a culinary adventure with Baba’s Bites, a unique vegan cookbook that transcends traditional food preparation. This handcrafted guide not only offers delicious recipes but also serves as a pathway to mindful eating, connecting the body, mind, and soul through plant-based cuisine. Key Highlights: One-Pot Vegan Delights: Dive into the convenience of one-pot cooking with Matthew’s expertly crafted recipes. Designed for ease and practicality, these dishes simplify your cooking routine without sacrificing flavour or nutritional value, making them perfect for any lifestyle.

Plant-Based Recipes for All Tastes: Our recipe collection spans a wide range of vegan dishes, offering something for every palate. Enjoy the diversity of global flavours and ingredients, all while adhering to a plant-based diet that respects the planet and nourishes the body.

Ayurvedic Insights for Individual Health: Gain insights into Ayurveda and learn how to tailor your diet to your unique body type. Our seasonally inspired recipes are infused with ancient Vedic wisdom, helping you align your diet with your personal health and wellness needs.

Global Flavours, Seasonal Ingredients: Take a gastronomic journey around the world with our globally inspired, seasonally adjusted recipes. From refreshing spring salads to comforting winter soups, these dishes bring the best of each season to your table.

Illustrations That Warm the Heart: Accompanied by Rebecca’s charming hand-drawn illustrations, each recipe is visually enriched, adding an element of warmth and creativity to your cooking experience.

Baba’s Bites is more than just a collection of vegan recipes; it’s a guide to transforming the way you perceive and enjoy food. Suitable for both experienced vegan chefs and newcomers to plant-based eating, this cookbook invites you to explore a world of flavours that nurture your health, happiness, and spiritual well-being. Open its pages to start a journey of discovery, embracing the foods that are truly meant for you.

Baking with Melanie Andrews

Melanie Andrews is a Professional Chef and Masterbaker and the recipes included in this book are her award-winning recipes from the highly successful “Scottish Baking Awards”. Melanie Andrews is the Founder/ Director of these awards in Scotland and she produces an easy guide to successful baking, whether you are baking for the first time or a seasoned baker. In her own words – you cannot fail to bake well if you have the right teacher and the right recipe. Melanie Andrews is at the top of her profession through talent and passion for the first love in her life – baking.

Beauty and the Gut

A healthy gut equals radiant beauty and health. It’s that simple!

Beauty and the Gut delves into advice on pre and probiotics, fermented foods, beauty enzymes, colon health, green juicing, leaky gut syndrome, auto-immune disorders, acne and more.

Discover how to enhance your outer beauty from the inside by eating the most natural radiant foods. Discover the wonderful effects that beauty foods can have on everything, from dry hair to pimpled skin, cellulite and ageing.

Learn the secrets to outstanding beauty and health and recognise that they are all connected to one thing – your GUT!

Beauty and the Gut is the ultimate guide to radically transform your health and beauty from the inside out. A book not to be missed!

Big Brain Revolution

Is Artificial Intelligence (AI) changing the world? Is AI updating the human brain? Can AI help to solve complex problems baffling scientists and politicians? The answer is yes. This book offers unique insights into the consequences of mixing psychology with technology. It takes you on a journey of discovery, stripping AI and the human brain back to basics. It's not academic, keeps knowledge simple and questions if humans can be manipulated by machines. Big data is already monitoring human movements. So imagine future powers of information gathering on an even bigger scale - including brain waves, emotions and inner thoughts. AI could personalise messages back to the brain and update love, desires and our destiny. Now is the time to be curious and to question. We must not hesitate. History will not forgive us. This is our common purpose. Our mission is to bequeath ethical AI advancements to the next generation. Humility tells us how working together is the secret sauce to guide AI to help mankind. It must help untangle collective problems such as climate change - bigger than the individual. This book is for everyone. So read it, pass it on and discuss how AI is impacting your brain and our futures.

Birthplaces of Australian Motor Racing

This book records and now preserves the history of Australian motorsport. Huge proportions of it were just on the very edge of being lost.
By the time you have read this book, you will be unbeatable at Australian motor racing trivia around any race campground fire pit or BBQ. You will know what the deadliest day was trackside in this country, the speedway promoter who discovered and named one of Australia’s biggest international rock groups, the most extreme financial car racing venue disaster of all time, why many residential roads have names the people who live there don’t appreciate, and what venue built its own railway station which is still in use today.
You will discover places worth dragging the family off to so you can take photos of rusting artefacts and sprout knowledgeable but boring nostalgic conversations. You’ll also be amazed at some of the historic car racing locations you’ve unknowingly been driving past.
How do you locate old car venues when some were utterly demolished 90 years ago, an industrial complex built on the same spot, which was in turn torn down and replaced with a university, a lake or a multi-storey housing estate?
This roll call of mine started out with two simple questions that most petrol heads in this country ask themselves sooner or later. How many car racing facilities have closed in Australia – and why?

Bloodstains on the Cocaine Trail

A homicide crisis began sweeping America after massive quantities of cocaine first began their journey into America in 1986. Drugs were trucked along the highways of the Cocaine Trail to every city in America. This influx of a deadly new drug led directly to a series of record deaths from overdoses, suicides and crime-related murders, family breakdowns and destroyed lives. Drugs are credited with driving the highest homicide rates in American history and a raging turf war between street gangs.

Crack cocaine unleashed a brutal era of violence, placing newspapers under enormous pressure to provide coverage. Relations with police were breaking down everywhere and crime coverage was in its death throes. Newspapers could not cover the homicides or give any context or explanations to such a social upheaval. Editors, reporters and police now reveal the shocking truth behind this agonizing episode in American history, when crime reporters had to re-invent journalism to get behind the police blue code. This book combines investigative journalism and narrative style to produce a rare portrait from within the secret inner world of newspapers.

Breast Cancer Smiles

On a cold day in February, 2018, Shazia goes from a tennis court in the morning to a hospital in the afternoon where she is diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer. As her journey unfolds, humour becomes her crutch, writing becomes her tool and a powerful connection to her South Asian roots becomes her purpose.

This isn’t a tale of cancer and the devastation it undoubtedly brings. It’s the story of a life-altering journey enriched by time. Shazia tells a tale of re-birth swathed in love, humour and pain. She unveils the shame of breast cancer in her birth culture that is killing women before their time. In her birthplace, Pakistan, cancer is casually known as ‘the kiss of death’.

For Shazia, it is quite the opposite. This is life through a different lens and a questioning of the status quo. Her musings provoke debate and challenge existing beliefs, holding up a different mirror to society. These chronicles are written during 18 months of chemotherapy, sepsis, surgery and radiotherapy. They are written with hope and an intermittent smile.

Broken Roads Lead Me Here

Broken Roads Lead Me Here tells the true-life story of a boy born into unimaginable abuse in Glasgow in the sixties. By the age of eight, Colin had been abandoned by his mother and continued to be sexually, physically, emotionally, and spiritually traumatised by the man she left him with. Blunted by severe trauma, Colin went through one unimaginable nightmare after another, each more traumatising and soul shattering than the last, with no one to tell and no way to understand why. He wondered as he drifted through life, what was to really become of him? Or his half-sisters? All the while, deep down, sensing that one day it could be his last.

At fifteen, he was thrown out of school, and at sixteen he was sent to prison. Colin survived rejection, abandonment, homelessness, gang wars, addiction, mental illness, overdoses, suicide attempts, and abusive adult relationships. But it always seemed as if he was living on borrowed time…

Even as he started writing his memoir, Colin had suffered a stroke, and near his recovery’s conclusion was then diagnosed with what was initially suspected as pancreatic cancer. While Colin’s diagnosis was eventually re-assessed as not immediately life threatening, it did leave him with a series of conditions which would continue to limit the quality of his day-to-day life. His illnesses and his experience of this instead of instilling a sense of profound hopelessness surprisingly led him to a profound sense of inner peace, clarity, and re-awakened purpose through his renewed faith in the real presence, love, forgiveness, and grace of God. His is a miraculous story of faith and redemption.

Colin Mackell is a husband, father, and grandfather. In his professional life as Psychotherapist, he has helped people who struggle to overcome drug and alcohol addiction, and helps them find new meaning, and explore new life paths. He is also the founder of Chrysalis Supported Association & Group CEO of Chrysalis Group Services, providing homes and support to some of life’s most vulnerable and disadvantaged people.

Café de Flore

Addressing the escalating global issue of mental health and suicide, Café de Flore is a serious book that provides inspiration and relief to those caught in the net of despair. Identifying the critical error made by mankind over the centuries. Café de Flore points towards an escape from the madness of the human condition.

An easily digestible form of philosophy, written with graceful authority, the book takes the reader on a journey that captures the sublime messages contained in the wreck of literature, poetry and prose.

Dostoevsky once said: “It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently.” What more does it take?

Encouraging the world to stop thinking, to entertain a degree of madness, to live with passion and to laugh more. This book provides a fresh perspective on the perceived struggles and difficulties we find ourselves trapped in, in this sad and lonely world.

Campaigning for Socialism: Memoirs of Max and Margaret Morris

Equality of educational provision became one of the objectives of the Labour Party exactly a century ago. Vigorous campaigning by the teachers’ trade unions and the Socialist Educational Association led to a period of progress in the 1960s to the early-1980s, but this was later undermined. Today the economic conditions and educational plight of British working class children are a disgrace and class divisions are greater than ever. For many years Max was a key figure in these battles and his memoirs provide a clear picture of events and the political forces involved. Readers must judge whether they provide an explanation for the lack of progress or could serve as a guide for the future.

Both Max and Margaret were active in wider socialist campaigning. Max was a party loyalist whereas Margaret only stayed within a party while in agreement with its key policies. She was a Labour Party activist and Council candidate in the 1950s but left over the failure to support CND. Re-joining later, she left over the war in Iraq. She had come to realise that First Past the Post undermines democracy.

The main targets of Margaret’s campaigning were housing problems and widening access to Higher Education. Max and Margaret shared objectives and actively assisted each other in their campaigns but did not always agree about the route forward. So their memoirs provide two perspectives on past events.

Change Your Life Forever!

Did you know that we have the freewill and are always given a chance to choose the kind of life we want to live? You can either choose to live in sin and choose a sinful lifestyle or alternatively, you can opt for living a life based upon the principles and core values of righteousness. In reality, you have a choice. Most people rarely question the way that they live and automatically follow a path of mindless and senseless self-destruction, destroying relationships with themselves and with others - by choosing to allow sin to underpin their hidden agendas and motivations for their life choices. But the truth is that you don’t have to live this way.

This book was written to help every person in the world understand how the seven deadly sins as we know them are not only extremely dangerous to us and those around us, but are the reasons and root causes that can lead us down the road of destruction. Understanding the ways these sins may operate or manifest in a person’s life, and how to deal with them, can help us to banish sinful and destructive routes in life once and for all. As it is only then that we can choose to turn our backs on the very lives that are causing us immense pain and suffering. Choosing to live a life of sin equates to gradual emotional and spiritual suicide, whereby one’s once joyful spirit and moral character of nobility and righteousness are eroded and eventually lost forever.

What are the benefits you will gain from reading this book?

• Help people from around the world understand how to combat these seven deadly sins, develop the willpower to consciously overcome destructive emotions and underlying motives - help you to restore a sense of hope, purpose, and new-found direction in your life.

• Will help you live a life based on truth and stop you from making costly mistakes that are causing you unhappiness, perennial pain, and suffering.

• Will help you realize that you deserve to be happy, and deserve to have a better life through simply knowing what is presented to you in this book; learning, understanding, and implementing the life-changing virtues taught in this self-help guide.

• Will help you will gain the ability to recognize the material manifestations of the seven deadly sins in the world and the people around you, and how best to neutralize or combat these attacks on your own lives.

• Incrementally find liberation and be set free and change your life forever! Our main motivating purpose is to liberate all people in this world. No matter who you are, where you’re from, your individual circumstances, or your past mistakes or faults. This guide will ultimately help you to understand that your destiny is your own to change!