Breakfast at Sotheby's is a wry, intimate, truly insider-y exploration of how art acquires its financial value, from Philip Hook, a senior director at Sotheby'sWhen you stand in front of a work of art in a museum or exhibition, the first two questions you normally ask yourself are 1) Do I like it? And 2) Who's it by? When you stand in front of a work of art in an auction room or dealer's gallery, you ask these two questions followed by others: how much is it worth? how muc...

Philip Hook takes the lid off the world of art dealing to reveal the brilliance, cunning, greed and daring of its practitioners. In a richly anecdotal narrative he describes the rise and occasional fall of the extraordinary men and women who over the centuries have made it their business to sell art to kings, merchants, nobles, entrepreneurs and museums.From its beginnings in Antwerp, where paintings were sometimes sold by weight, to the rich hauteur of the contemporary gallery in ...

A SUNDAY TIMES BOOK OF THE YEARThe ten years leading up to the First World War were the most exciting, frenzied and revolutionary in the history of art. They were the crucible of Modernism, when Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism and Abstract Art all burst forth. Simultaneously the Old Master market boomed, and art itself was politically weaponised in advance of approaching war.What was the conventional art against which Modernism was rebelli...

Parnello Moran buys a German romantic landscape at an auction, but then it's stolen from him. When he sets out to recover it he discovers all its recent owners met violent deaths. Gradually he uncovers a deeper past, and the biggest surprise of all - the secret of the soldier in the wheatfield.

Philip Hook returns to fiction in this collection of short stories. Many are set in the art world, of which the author has deep inside knowledge. Others are about cricket, football, war, espionage and marriage. Some are funny, some are moving, some are surreal. All of them are compulsive reading.

1945, an art historian leads a convoy towards Dresden. Fifty years later, Oswald Ginn is sent a photograph of a masterpiece presumed destroyed in the bombing of Dresden. As the art world speculates, three people are propelled on an international search, and someone sits back and watches.

A man is found dead in a London hotel room, the only clue to his identity a polaroidof a lost Impressionist painting. A young man inherits his mother's diaries and realisesher early life in France was much more eventful than he'd realised.And as the extent of the past's effect on the present becomes clear, Daniel iscaught up in a web of conspiracy and betrayal that began decades ago.

While investigating the mutilation of a painting in a London gallery, journalist Minto Maitland finds himself drawn into a horrific story of brutality and betrayal during the Hungarian revolution. Exposing odd connections to art dealer Alexander Courtney, Maitland suspects an appalling secret.

In 1892 Degas' painting In the Café was sold for a mere 180 guineas at auction, with the public hissing as the hammer fell. Less than a century later another Impressionist work, Renoir's Moulin de la Galette, sold at Sotheby's for $78 million, accompanied by enthusiastic applause. In this history-cum-memoir Philip Hook, Senior Director of Sotheby's Impressionist and Modern Art department, examines the public's change of heart toward Impressionism. Starting with its shocking novelty and con...

"It's just a masterpiece. When I read it I thought, how is it that we don't know about this-how is it that I am the only person I know who's read this book?" Wes Anderson, on Stefan Zweig's Beware of PityContents: *A Conversation with Wes Anderson-*Wes Anderson discusses Zweig's life and work with Zweig biographer George Prochnik. *The World of Yesterday-*Selected extracts from Zweig's memoir, an unrivalled evocation of bygone Europe. *Beware of Pity-*An e...

THE FIRST NOVEL IN PHILIP KERR’S ACCLAIMED HISTORICAL MYSTERY SERIESWhen private investigator Bernie Gunther agrees to track down some stolen jewels, his search takes him down the dangerous streets of pre-World War 2 Berlin and into the path of the most influential players in Nazi Germany…Wisecracking cop turned private investigator Bernie Gunther specializes in missing persons, and as the Third Reich’s power has grown, Bernie has become a ...

'One of the greatest anti-heroes ever written' LEE CHILDThe war may be over, but the remnants of the Nazis are still causing trouble for Bernie Gunther.In post-war Vienna, the term 'peace' is relative - the Americans, British and Russians govern the city in an uneasy truce, and the main difference is that now it's the Soviet secret police making people disappear rather than the Nazis. When Bernie is asked by a high-ranking Soviet official t...