The Story of Looking

A wide-ranging history of looking, you will gaze at it in wonder – Ian Sansom * * Guardian * *A history of the human gaze … Illuminating … Roams freely across history, art, film, photography, science and technology … Indispensable as a reference book * * Observer * *Bloody genius – CHRISTOPHER DOYLEIntriguing and beautiful … [A] gloriously haphazard intellectual scrapbook … Wide-ranging, deep-seeing and clever * * Scotland on Sunday * *An attempt to catalogue how and why we look, what we look at and how our social and cultural surroundings shape what we see … the result is, by turns, learned, often surprising … Fascinating * * Glasgow Sunday Herald, Arts Books of the Year * *Brilliant … His taste is eclectic and his judgments precise and persuasive * * New York Times * *Extraordinary … Visually ensnaring and intellectually lithe * * Telegraph on The Story of Film * *Dazzling in its breadth and intelligence … A hugely impressive work by a uniquely talented storyteller * * Guardian on A Story of Children and Film * *

Mark Cousins is a Northern Irish author, producer and filmmaker. He is the former director of the Edinburgh International Film Festival and a regular contributor to Prospect and The Times. He is the author of the book The Story of Film and the creator of the acclaimed Channel 4 documentary series of the same name. He was Co-Artistic Director of a number of projects with Tilda Swinton, one of which involved manually hauling a portable cinema through the Scottish Highlands. He lives in Edinburgh.