Books by Owen Hatherley

Militant Modernism is a defence against Modernism's many detractors. It looks at design, film and architecture - especially architecture - and pursues the notion of an evolved modernism that simply refuses to stop being necessary. Owen Hatherley gives us new ways to look at what we thought was familiar - Bertolt Brecht, Le Corbusier, even Vladimir Mayakovsky. Through Hatherley's eyes we see all of the quotidian modernists of the 20th century - lesser lights, too - perhaps understanding them for the first time. Whether we are looking at Britain's brutalist aesthetics, Russian Constructivism, or the Sexpol of Wilhelm Reich, the message is clear. There is no alternative to Modernism.

Should Britain form a new union with its old 'Dominions' in Canada, Australia andNew Zealand? Are they really our closest allies and relations? And is there any reasonwhy they should want to unite again with us?

How to make a fairer, more just city.

Owen Hatherley takes us on a transcontinental tour of the cities of the former Soviet Union, discovering what they can teach us about changing our cities for the better.

Why should we have to ';Keep Calm and Carry On'? In this brilliant polemical rampage, Owen Hatherley shows how our past is being resold in order to defend the indefensible. From the marketing of a ';make do and mend' aesthetic to the growing nostalgia for a utopian past that never existed, a cultural distraction scam prevents people grasping the truth of their condition. The Ministry of Nostalgia explodes the creation of a false history: a rewriting of the austerity of the 1940s and 1950s, which saw the development of a welfare state while the nation crawled out of the devastations of war. This period has been recast to explain and offer consolation for the violence of neoliberalism, an ideology dedicated to the privatisation of our common wealth. In coruscating prosewith subjects ranging from Ken Loach's documentaries, Turner Prizeshortlisted video art, London vernacular architecture, and Jamie Oliver's cookingHatherley issues a passionate challenge to the injunction to keep calm and carry on.

Sixteen short essays on places as varied as Glasgow and Norwich, Llanidloes and Sheffield, by the finest English Architectural writer of the Twentieth Century.

In A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain, Owen Hatherley skewered New Labour's architectural legacy in all its witless swagger. Now, in the year of the Diamond Jubilee and the London Olympics, he sets out to describe what the Coalition's altogether different approach to economic mismanagement and civic irresponsibility is doing to the places where the British live.In a journey that begins and ends in the capital, Hatherley takes us from Plymouth and Brighton to Belfast and Aberdeen, by way of the eerie urbanism of the Welsh valleys and the much-mocked splendour of modernist Coventry. Everywhere outside the unreal Southeast, the building has stopped in towns and cities, which languish as they wait for the next bout of self-defeating austerity.Hatherley writes with unrivalled aggression about the disarray of modern Britain, and yet this remains a book about possibilities remembered, about unlikely successes in the midst of seemingly inexorable failure. For as well as trash, ancient and modern, Hatherley finds signs of the hopeful country Britain once was and hints of what it might become.

If we remember them at all, the Sheffield pop group Pulp are remembered for jolly class warfare ditty Common People, for the celebrity of their interestingly-named frontman, for the latter waving his arse at Michael Jackson at the Brit awards, for being part of a non-movement called Britpop, and for disappearing almost without trace shortly after. They made a few good tunes, they did some funny videos, and while they might be National Treasures, theyre nothing serious. Are they? This book argues that they should be taken seriously very seriously indeed. Attempting to wrest Pulp away from the grim jingoistic spectacle of Britpop and the revivals-of-a-revival circuit, this book charts the very strange things that occur in their records, taking us deep into a strange exotic land; a land of acrylics, adultery, architecture, analogue synthesisers and burning class anger. This is book about pop music, but it is mainly a book about sex, the city and class via the 1990s finest British pop group.