The Story of Looking

A wide-ranging history of looking … you will gaze at it in wonder * * 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 and filmmaker. His books include Widescreen: Watching. Real. People. Elsewhere and The Story of Film. His films - including I am Belfast, The First Movie, Atomic and The Story of Film: An Odyssey - have won a Peabody Award, the Prix Italia and the Stanley Kubrick Award, and have been shown in MoMA in New York, at the Cannes Film Festival and around the world. He is Honorary Professor of Film at the University of Glasgow. He lives in Edinburgh.