White Mischief

A true life account of a brutal murder that scandalized colonial Kenya, taking us deep into the decadent heart of British high-society and its imperial tensions.

A story which is as compelling and violent as a thriller, but which also happens to be one of the most dazzling feats of reportage in recent years

It is a measure of James Fox's remarkable achievement that in White Mischief he not only produces an impeccably researched and lucidly written "last word" on this notorious case but also brings these astonishing people and their perplexed lives so vividly and compellingly to life

A fascinating piece of investigative reporting that possesses all the resonance of a social history and the drama of a good mystery...[and] a narrative strategy that allows the reader the excitement of watching a tenacious reporter piece together the truth

Leave P.D. James on the shelf, tuck Dick Francis away in the saddlebag, James Fox's investigation has everything you look for in a thriller

James Fox was born in Washington DC in 1945 and educated in England. He worked as a journalist for the Sunday Times and the Observer in Africa and then in England, and has written for numerous other publications. His other books include The Langhorne Sisters and co-authorship of Life, Keith Richards' bestselling autobiography. White Mischief was made into a movie starring Greta Scacchi and Charles Dance.

Just before 3am on January 24th, 1941, when Britain was preoccupied with surviving the Blitz, the body of Josslyn Hay, Earl of Erroll, was discovered lying on the floor of his Buick, at a road intersection some miles outside Nairobi, with a bullet in his head. 
 
A leading figure in Kenya's colonial community, the Earl had recently been appointed Military Secretary, but he was primarily a seducer of other men's wives. Sir Henry Delves Broughton, whose wife was Erroll's current conquest, had an obvious motive for the murder, but no one was ever convicted and the question of who killed him became a classic mystery, a scandal and cause celebre. 
 
Among those who became fascinated with the Erroll case was Cyril Connolly who joined up with James Fox for a major investigation of the case in 1969 for the Sunday Times magazine. After his death James Fox inherited the obsession and a commitment to continue in pursuit of the story both in England and Kenya in the late 1970s. One day, on a veranda overlooking the Indian Ocean, Fox came across a piece of evidence that seemed to bring all the fragments and pieces together and convinced him that he saw a complete picture...

A Journey Through Britain’s Lost Arts and Vanishing Trades

Craftland

James Fox is Director of Studies in History of Art at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and a BAFTA-nominated broadcaster. He is the author of The World According to Colour: A Cultural History, which was chosen as a Book of the Year by the Sunday Times, Daily Telegraph, New Statesman and Spectator. His many acclaimed BBC television documentaries include programmes about British art, Japanese culture, the connections between art and nature, and the history of colour. He is also an advisor to the Loewe Craft Foundation and a Trustee of the Marchmont Makers Foundation, which supports arts and crafts practitioners across the Scottish Borders and beyond, aiming to inspire creativity across the arts, crafts, business and social enterprise.

The story of craft is the story of who we are. 
 
Britain has always been a craft land. For generations what we made with our hands defined our families, communities and regions. Craftland brings to life the vanishing skills, traditions and trades that shaped the fabric and governed the rhythms of everyday life in Britain for hundreds of years. 
 
Through the stories of often humble-seeming objects of exquisite beauty, precision, utility and meaning, it shows how craft connects us to the land, emerging from local natural materials, and is the material expression of our regional identities and cultures. And through encounters with some of the last remaining master craftspeople at work today – weavers and wheelwrights, coopers and coppice-workers, boat-builders and bell-founders, silversmiths and watch-makers – we glimpse not only our past but another way of life, one that is not yet lost and whose wisdom could yet shape our future. 
 
For as long as there are humans, there will be craft, ever evolving in response to changing technologies, environments and communities. Craftland is a celebration of that deeply necessary connection between our creative instincts and the material world we inhabit, revealing a richer and more connected way of living.

James Fox

A brilliantly fluent and readable history of colour

Fairly shimmers with Fox's eye for arresting facts and anecdotes

Intelligent, vividly written ... I'm going to buy three copies

Flits with enthusiasm and lightly worn learning from Bronze Age gold-workers to Turner, Titian to Yves Klein

Colour becomes a philosophical feast - astrophysics, the origins of civilisation, a palette of moral associations

A manual to navigate and enjoy the extraordinary design of the world around us

A Cultural History

The world comes to us in colour. But colour lives as much in our imaginations as it does in our surroundings, as this scintillating book reveals. Each chapter immerses the reader in a single colour, drawing together stories from the histories of art and humanity to illuminate the meanings it has been given over the eras and around the globe. Showing how artists, scientists, writers, philosophers, explorers and inventors have both shaped and been shaped by these wonderfully myriad meanings, James Fox reveals how, through colour, we can better understand their cultures, as well as our own. Each chapter offers a fresh perspective on a different epoch, and together they form a vivid, exhilarating history of the world. 'We have projected our hopes, anxieties and obsessions onto colour for thousands of years,' Fox writes. 'The history of colour, therefore, is also a history of humanity.'

James Fox

Praise for The World According to Colour

A book to brighten the dullest days

A brilliantly fluent and readable history of colour

Fairly shimmers with Fox's eye for arresting facts and anecdotes

A book to brighten the dullest days

A brilliantly fluent and readable history of colour

Fairly shimmers with Fox's eye for arresting facts and anecdotes

A book to brighten the dullest days

A brilliantly fluent and readable history of colour

Fairly shimmers with Fox's eye for arresting facts and anecdotes

Books by James Fox

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