Extraordinary. An intellectual feast as well as a visual oneEdmund de Waal author of The Hare with Amber EyesThe 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 colour 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.