# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Sophie Calle's "Exquisite Pain" Helped Me Get over a Bad Breakup | Artsy

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
I became obsessed with Sophie Calle's "Exquisite Pain" (2003) at the same time that I stopped talking to my ex-but couldn't stop talking about him.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
back to Contents

Dennis Wheatley:
An Introduction

Early Life - the rebel

Dennis Yates Wheatley was born into a prosperous middle-class family of London wine merchants on 8th January 1897.

At the age of 8 he was sent to a prep school on the South Coast (where his gift for storytelling first emerged, when he entertained the boys with stories after 'lights out') and then to Dulwich College (1909-1910), from which he was expelled. He was then sent to the physically hard Royal Naval training ship HMS Worcester to complete his education. After this the intention was that he would spend time in each of the major wine making countries to learn the business, but he only managed six months with a wine merchant in Traben-Trarbach in Germany before World War I intervened.

World War I

Dennis Wheatley in World War I

Like many of his contemporaries, DW was keen to join up but he found it hard to find a regiment. Eventually he was accepted by the Royal Artillery Company. He was in England until February 1917, and life was a mixture of excitement and boredom. He caught bronchitis in an exercise on Salisbury Plain in January 1917 and this was a blessing in disguise because it prevented his accepting a commission from a General who hated him which would almost certainly have led to his death within a few weeks.

Providence took a hand because when he had recuperated he was sent to a camp at Luton where he met a cultured conman called Gordon Eric Gordon Tombe. GEGT took DW under his wing and taught him about life, sex, world religions and modern and classical literature. He very much shaped the man DW was to become, and without him DW's life might have taken a very different turn.

DW was finally sent to France in August 1917 and saw his fair share of grisly deaths - both of men and of horses. At one stage according to his autobiography briefly and by chance he ended up commanding over one thousand men. He was gassed in May 1918 and sent home to die, but recovered.

Life as a wine merchant in the 'roaring twenties'

Reproduced with the permission of Special Collections, Leeds University Library (MS1942),
and with thanks to the Wheatley family.

After the War, DW joined the family wine business in Mayfair and with considerable promotional flair he took it steadily up market. He sold liqueurs and ultra-rare brandies, and at its peak the business counted not only the Duke of York (later King George VI) but a total of 'three Kings, twenty one Imperial, Royal and Serene Highnesses, twelve British Ducal Houses, the Archbishop of Canterbury and a score of millionaires' among its clientele.

DW married his first wife in 1922 and they had a son; but they divorced in 1931 and DW married his second wife Joan, to whom he remained married for the rest of his life.

During this period there was a secret tragedy - Gordon Tombe disappeared in April 1922 and DW could not find out what had happened to him. In fact he had been murdered by a business colleague. When the body was discovered in September 1923, the police investigation was headline news. DW was fortunate not to be caught up in the investigation and followed the case extremely closely.

When the Great Depression hit, DW was financially over-extended, faced near bankruptcy, and was forced to sell his wine business. Knowing his love of telling tales, his wife suggested he write a book.

Desperation leads to DW becoming an author ...

First editions of
'The Forbidden Territory' and 'The Devil Rides Out'

DW wrote a detective novel called 'Three Inquisitive People' which introduced the Duke de Richleau and his friends and it was accepted for publication by Hutchinson, who were to be his publishers for the rest of his life. Before the book could be published he wrote a second book, an adventure story set in Russia and featuring the same set of heroes - 'The Forbidden Territory'. Hutchinson decided this was a better novel and should be published first. With DW promoting it heavily to his friends, it was launched on 3rd January 1933. It was an immediate bestseller, and was reprinted seven times in seven weeks. DW's career as an author had taken off.

He followed this with an 'out of series' novel which he wrote in a fortnight, and then went back to the writing of impeccably researched novels with 'Black August', which featured his second principal hero Gregory Sallust, and 'The Fabulous Valley'. In 1934 DW wrote an Occult novel, 'The Devil Rides Out'. Phil Baker rates it as the best occult novel of the twentieth century, and it is his most famous work.

Other novels followed, all best-sellers, until the outbreak of World War II.

World War II - 'into the stratosphere'

Wing Commander Dennis Wheatley

The early stages of World War II were frustrating for DW. As an old soldier he wanted to join up again, but now in his forties, he was too old.

DW wrote to the Ministry of Information twice seeking a job in propaganda, but he didn't even receive the courtesy of a reply. His old friend Maxwell Knight in MI5 suggested he keep writing novels to keep the public's minds off the ghastliness to come, and this he did.

With his typical flair for innovation he resurrected his hero Gregory Sallust as a secret agent working against the Nazis using contemporary wartime events as his backdrop, and once again the books were immediate bestsellers.

DW still hankered to 'get into the war', and his break came through an almost fantastic sequence of events. His wife had become a driver for MI5, and as the battle for Dunkirk was starting, she happened to have a Captain Hubert Stringer in the back of the car. He confided to her that he had been tasked to come up with ideas to resist invasion (which was considered by many of the top brass to be imminent), and that he was struggling. DW's wife replied 'Why don't you ask my husband ? His speciality is original ideas, and he would simply jump at the chance of trying to make himself useful.'

Duly invited, DW wrote a 7,000 word paper in less than fourteen hours. He could hardly have imagined what followed. Given permission to pass it on, DW copied it to three of his most well connected friends. One read it with interest, one invited him to the War Office at midnight and informed him that his paper would reach the Vice-Chief of the Imperial General Staff, and another, the King's confidant Sir Louis Greig, invited him to a lunch at the Dorchester where he was asked to write a second paper - on what he would do if he was on the other side, and looking at how best to invade Britain for the German High Command.

In the ensuing year or so, operating in Top Secret, as well as writing his novels, DW acted as a one-man think-tank for the military high command, writing some twenty papers on subjects as diverse as how to maintain morale in the periods of deepest despair in the War to how Europe should be re-constituted should the Allies ever win.

All this was done as a civilian, but in the winter of 1941 it was decided DW should go nominally into uniform, and be commissioned into the Royal Air Force. Seeing who his sponsors were, the interviewer knew that something special must be planned for him, and said 'there is clearly no need for me to ask you any questions; why don't you ask me some?'.

DW was actually to become involved in Deception Planning, but things got off to a very slow start as the High Command hadn't really worked out how to use this resource.

The London Controlling Section

Things only got going when DW was given a new commander, Colonel Johnny Bevan, who was both well connected (he was a personal friend of Field Marshal Alanbrooke) and super-smart. Between them they got themselves taken seriously, and when the time came for Operation Torch ( the re-taking of French North Africa) in late 1942, the two of them were responsible for coming up with the (totally successful) cover plans.

Their team, known by the deliberately obscure title of 'The London Controlling Section' eventually became seven strong, and was later responsible not only for implementing the plans for 'Monty's double' and for 'The Man Who Never Was', but for devising the 'D Day' plans under which the Germans would be persuaded that there was a First United States Army Group (FUSAG) (which there wasn't), and that its destination was the Pas de Calais rather than the beaches of Normandy.

The London Controlling Section's top secret operations were so successful that its official letter of thanks at the end of the War referred to its 'outstanding contribution', and to it 'having made a decisive contribution to the success of a major operation, namely the Allies return to the Continent in June 1944'. Official estimates of the time considered that in the Normandy landings alone the group's stratagems pinned down some 400,000 enemy forces where they were not required, facilitating the landings, preventing even larger casualties, and helping in a very material way to procure victory for the Allies.

The official memo of thanks to the
London Controlling Section

Not bad work, DW later reflected, for a seven-man team.

The post war years - life as an international bestseller

DW as President of the Lymington Show in the late 1960s

After the War, DW bought a mini country mansion in seaside Lymington in Hampshire, and he continued to write books, introducing a third principal character, Roger Brook, whose exploits took place in the Napoleonic era so DW would not be tempted to reveal contemporary secrets by mistake. He worked hard and to a well-disciplined routine. For around eight months of the year DW would devote himself to his writings. He would rise mid-morning and sometimes go to bed well after midnight, depending on how his writing was going. He took the remaining months off to go travelling, partly for pleasure and partly to research his next books. In the days when international travel was a distinct privilege, DW went round the world twice, and used countries as diverse as Sri Lanka, Mexico and Egypt as backdrops for his books.

During this time several of his books were filmed by Hammer, the most famous being 'The Devil Rides Out' with his friend Sir Christopher Lee playing the role of the Duke, a role which he enjoyed enormously.

DW was a born collector and collected many things; but he is particularly famous for his library, which contained an impressive array of signed first editions of twentieth century fiction as well as many hundreds of books (some very rare) that he used in his research.

A stream of his friends - including a host of wartime 'top brass' - came down for stays with him in Lymington or kept up a long-term correspondence, and he was renowned for answering fan mail, almost always giving his correspondents helpful and personal replies.

Death

As DW got older, understandably he became less active. He moved back to London full-time in 1968, and started writing his autobiography. There were five volumes but these were abridged into four after his death, with only the first volume being published while he was alive.

DW died on 10th November 1977, aged 80, and his ashes were buried in Brookwood cemetery.

DW's published output

DW wrote sixty five books in all, with fifty six being novels and the remainder non-fiction. Eleven featured the Duke de Richleau, eleven Gregory Sallust, and twelve involved Roger Brook. Some nine of these are considered 'Black Magic' novels - a genre for which DW is particularly famous.

In addition DW wrote with his friend JG Links four 'Crime Dossiers' in which readers were provided with physical clues (strands of hair etc) and invited to solve a crime for themselves. The identity of the real murderer was contained in a sealed envelope at the back; and he also devised three Board Games (two of these in World War II).

Additionally, he was secretly commissioned by the Foreign Office in the 1950s to produce a novel for the Arab market extolling the virtues of Islam over Communism. Only one copy of the Arabic version is known and it has never been published in English.

DW's books today and his reputation

By the nineteen sixties, DW was selling over a million copies of his novels a year; his work was sold in around twenty nine countries and translated into over twenty eight languages, and altogether he is estimated to have sold something like fifty million copies of his books in his lifetime.

While some of his first editions fetch enormous prices (in 2017, Sir Christopher Lee's copy of 'The Devil Rides Out' was put on the market for £30,000, and his own specially bound set of his own works was sold initially to the Getty Library and more recently in 2015 for £20,000), his book sales since his death have slowed down very considerably. This is partly because - with the exception of a few novels such as The Devil Rides Out - his books were never comprehensively filmed; unlike, say, the books of Agatha Christie or Ian Fleming. The now 'old fashioned' background to the novels may also have contributed, but this has not prevented the resurrection of other authors of the era. It may well be that if some of the books are filmed - and particularly if some of his Black Magic novels are filmed using CGI - he will once again become world famous. DW's novels are all available electronically, his (699 page) biography has been written by the well-known biographer Phil Baker, and Pulitzer Prize winning author Tina Rosenberg has written about DW's work as a wartime Deception Planner in an e-Book. These are all helping to introduce DW to fresh audiences.

People are accordingly coming to appreciate once again DW's importance as an author to the fabric of British life in the 1930s to 1970s and to the perception of Britain overseas through the overseas sales of his translated works, and perhaps more importantly the vital contribution that he and a small handful of colleagues made to some of the most important Allied victories in World War II.

CTHB
31st December 2017

For a comprehensive account of DW's life, see the site's 'virtual Museum'

# data[].attributes.headline
Presentation - Documentary Photobooks and Visual Ethics

# data[].attributes.subject
Presentation - Documentary Photobooks and Visual Ethics

# data[].attributes.body
This is an opportunity to meet your peers in order to discuss the more unusual books which can inspire you in your own practice.

There is no requirement to read a book before each meeting, as this is your choice to do so or not, but merely a place to use BookLab as a springboard for ideas in your research and practice. It can also be helpful as a way to start discussing and analysing books.

Please note that there may be some unavoidable 'spoiler alerts' but this is not about knowing the end of the book, just a place to highlight some key aspects.

Enjoy!

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/feb/07/john-sassall-country-doctor-a-fortunate-man-john-berger-jean-mohr

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.christianpatterson.com/books/

# data[].attributes.body
Illustrated by Graham Rawle

# data[].attributes.headline
Welcome to BookLab with Programme Tutor Dr Katrina Whitehead.  First Tuesday of the month 6-7pm.

# data[].attributes.subject
Welcome to BookLab with Programme Tutor Dr Katrina Whitehead.  First Tuesday of the month 6-7pm.

# data[].attributes.body
Welcome to BookLab with Programme Tutor Dr Katrina Whitehead. We meet on the first Tuesday of the month 6-7pm.

BookLab is a monthly space for exploring the innovative world of artists’ books, photobooks, experimental narratives and hybrid forms of publishing. It focusses on creative, visual, and interdisciplinary book practices. analysing books that sit between art object, archive, narrative and experiment.

Each month we explore a different theme through an illustrated talk, with opportunities to ask questions. This Padlet acts as a shared digital reading room: a place to view examples, suggest further works, reflect on the month’s topic, and contribute your own discoveries.

Across the year, we will look at books that challenge our assumptions about what a book can be, including sculptural books, archival reconstructions, feminist photobooks, altered texts, narrative artworks, zines, and interdisciplinary formats.

April is our World Book Night Showcase.
On 23 April, BookLab hosts a digital exhibition of student artwork inspired by a book you have encountered this year. You can submit any creative response from photography, writing, illustration, textiles, collage, or inter-disciplinary.

BookLab is a space for curiosity, creativity and conversation — a living archive of the books that shape your practice.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Happy World Book Night!

Today is all about celebrating books and sharing the benefits that reading has on our lives.

How can you join in? Its simple, read a book! You can read anything you like in any way you want. We also want you to share what you're reading with others, whether it's in person or online. Can you encourage someone who doesn't regularly read to join you today?

Everyone is invited to the #ReadingHour from 7-8pm tonight. This is a time for you to dedicate just for books; you can read alone, with others, or even call a friend to swap recommendations. Share how you're spending the hour on social media using #ReadingHour.

Join us tonight with host Bobby Seagull, who will be joined by Dr Alex George, Ayisha Malik, Dreda Say Mitchell and Lemn Sissay for a night of celebrating reading. Tickets are available to join us in-person at the British Library, or online for you to watch at home. Find out more.

Everyone is invited to the #ReadingHour from 7-8pm on 23 April. This is a time for you to dedicate just for books; you can read alone, aloud to others, or even call a friend to swap recommendations. Share how you're spending the hour on social media using #ReadingHour. Find out why you should take part.

Find out which books are on the World Book Night 2022 booklist, offering recommendations for everyone, with fiction, non-fiction, Quick Reads and audiobooks for adults and young people aged 16+. Take a look at the booklist and choose your next read.

Do you love audiobooks, or would you like to try one for the first time?

We're offering you the chance to download a free audiobook, selecting between four titles from our World Book Night 2022 booklist.

World Book Night is run by The Reading Agency, a national charity that tackles life's big challenges through the proven power of reading.

Tweets by WorldBookNight

News

Impact

Resources

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Today is all about celebrating books and sharing the benefits that reading has on our lives. How can you join in? Its simple, read a book! You can read anything you like in any way you want. We also want you to share what you're reading with others, whether it's in person or online.

# data[].attributes.body
Please speak to OCASA if you would like to arrange a visit to a book launch, print fair, artist book archive, bookbinder or publishing house, as a group.

For opportunities to discuss booking a table at an artist's book fair event, speak to Katrina Whitehead.

# data[].attributes.headline
The Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger (2003)

# data[].attributes.subject
The Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger (2003)

# data[].attributes.headline
World Book Night -  The Mountains Are Calling… 

# data[].attributes.subject
World Book Night -  The Mountains Are Calling… 

# data[].attributes.body
Deadline: Deadline 3rd March 2026 - Early submissions are very welcome.

# data[].attributes.body
Inspired by the story ‘Flaubert’s Parrot’, Barnes, J. Everyman’s Library, 2012. I created a Tetra Pak print with a touch of watercolour. The print is for an exhibition held for World Book Night 2024 at UWE, Bristol followed by an exhibition in Hong Kong.

# data[].attributes.attachment_caption
Inspired by the poem ‘Feathers’. Ashworth D. (2022) ‘Feathers’, Loss pg. 113, Black and White Publishing Ltd.  Entered into World Book Night Exhibition 2024.

# data[].attributes.body
An interdisciplinary Gelli print with hand printed text inspired by Lord Byron’s Darkness and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein The two works are connected by time, place and ‘darkness’ View A Dark Dream Takes Flight

# data[].attributes.headline
The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig (2022)

# data[].attributes.subject
The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig (2022)

# data[].attributes.body
The Flavour of Murder: Food and Crime in the Novels of Agatha Christie

Baučeková, Silvia

The paper is situated in the OU library (digital download).

https://library-search.open.ac.uk/permalink/44OPN_INST/j6vapu/cdi_doaj_primary_oai_doaj_org_article_b34096c9da4248d0988f220f0873288d

# data[].attributes.body
There are many apps to store your books. I can recommend Goodreads which is a free online resource to store all your books and you can also write feedback to help other readers. It can be linked to your Amazon account if you require so that all your books are automatically listed.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Find and read more books you'll love, and keep track of the books you want to read. Be part of the world's largest community of book lovers on Goodreads.

# data[].attributes.body
Links have been provided from the OU library for articles relating to the books.

If you choose to read any of the books in their entirety, you may be able to obtain a copy of the book via your local library or the British Library.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
We are the UK’s national library. Open to everyone and free to use. Explore our buildings, study, meet friends, attend an event and get free access to over 170 million items.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Zoom is the leader in modern enterprise cloud communications.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Capture, manage, and search all your video content.

# data[].attributes.body
https://kitwilliams.co.uk/

# data[].attributes.headline
Welcome to Art / Creative Responses to Writing 

# data[].attributes.subject
Welcome to Art / Creative Responses to Writing 

# data[].attributes.body
Hello everyone!

This evening our theme is Art / Image-embedded novels / creative responses to writing, exploring how art and literature intertwine through image‑embedded novels and creative responses to writing.

It’s a theme that speaks directly to the way visual storytelling and text can inspire each other, and it’s especially relevant for us as art and design students. As a visual, interdisciplinary artist who likes reading, this is perhaps one of my favourite themes of the year and have studied it in-depth for my PhD.

We’ll also consider The Nabokov Paper, which examines how artists respond to literature. If you’d like to read more, you can access an academic article about it through the Open University library here:
👉 The Nabokov Paper – OU Library Article

Whether you’re here to share your thoughts, discover new ideas, or simply enjoy listening in, you’re warmly welcome. This club is about connection, curiosity, and creativity — so bring your imagination and join the conversation.

Looking forward to seeing you there.

Warm wishes,
Katrina

# data[].attributes.body
Nabokov Paper project by Kate Briggs and Lucrezia Russo, which took Nabakov's exam questions and artists writers interpreted them, an artist Madeliene Walton listed all the foodstuffs in Ulysses.

The Nabokov Paper is an experiment in novel-reading. The project takes as its starting point a now famous class taught during the 1950s by Vladimir Nabokov at Cornell University, New York State, entitled Literature 311-312: Masters of European Fiction. Nabokov’s approach to teaching literary reading was notoriously idiosyncratic. Convinced that one must teach the books themselves, not ideas or generalities, Nabokov would make diagrams of the floor plans of fictional buildings, map the routes taken by characters through the spaces of the novel, and draw items of clothing or furniture; he would also propose to track the course of a single letter, offer a visual representation of a stylistic device, and uncover what he called the mysteries of literary structures. His methods are striking for the range of gestures they call for in the name of good reading. The published Lectures on Literature (New York: Harcourt, 1980) concludes with an appendix of sample exam questions. Responding to those questions some sixty years after the fact offers a means to explore what Nabokov’s take on how to read might have to teach us today: about the novel, about how reading works across practices and disciplines, and about the past, present and future forms of literary criticism.

In April 2012, ten artists, eight writers, six university professors, three translators, two architects, a librarian, a curator, a graphic designer, an illustrator and a computer engineer each selected a question on one of seven course texts: Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis”, Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way, and James Joyce’s Ulysses. The responses they turned in take the form of writing, drawing, painting, film, graphs, indexes, lists, maps, newly designed editions, objects, scale-models, a lecture and a reading game. This work, together with an introduction to the aims of the project, is presented in The Nabokov Paper – a publication that acts both as a record of the experiment and an invitation to undertake it again.

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.laiaabril.com/project/on-rape/#books

# data[].attributes.body
https://www.laiaabril.com/project/on-abortion/#books

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Built with Open LMS, a Moodle-based product. Copyright © 2026 Open LMS, All Rights Reserved.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Emilio Isgrò: Erasing to Create - Estorick Collection

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A major exhibition tracing the extraordinary artistic journey of Italian artist Emilio Isgrò (b. 1937), from his pioneering conceptual work of the 1960s to his most recent creative explorations. Organised in collaboration with the Fondazione Emilio Isgrò and the Consulate General of Italy in London, this retrospective celebrates more than six decades of innovation. It charts the evolution of the artist’s distinctive approach, from early works of visual poetry to examples of his famous Cancellatura (or ‘Erasure’) whereby the words and letters of printed texts are judiciously obscured, revealing new meanings and visual rhythms.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Expanding the book: A new National Art Library display • V&A Blog

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Expanding the book: a new National Art Library display The new display, Expanding the book, is now up and available to view outside the National Art Library doors. The two-case display explores how artists challenge the traditional concept of the book by using unusual materials and formats.To choose these books, I went on a mission inside our locked cupboards where we keep our artists’ book collection. By opening up countless boxes, I discovered lots of weird and wonderful books and made a selection that would eventually become this display.Lady Freedom Among Us is a sculptural artists’ book by Claire Van…

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Turner Contemporary presents the first UK exhibition by Sophie Calle since 2009, exploring memory, disappearance and longing. 3 October 2026–23 January…

# data[].attributes.body
https://cfpr.uwe.ac.uk/save-the-date-babe-2026/

# data[].attributes.body
What is a Book? https://library-search.open.ac.uk/permalink/44OPN_INST/la9sg5/alma9953203048302316