Colour: Travels Through the Paintbox - Tapa dura

Packed with stories, anecdotes and adventures. A full rainbow ... as vivid as the colours themselves (Express)

You get your money's worth and change to spare ... Both picaresque and picturesque, it's a rich read. (Evening Standard)

This is a rare and wonderful book - a model of erudition and charm, the
writing elegant and precise, and with at least one new and fascinating
revelation on every single page. I could not be more enthusiastic.

(Simon Winchester, author of THE PROFESSOR AND THE)

It's pure pleasure to join this gutsy arts reporter-cum-scholar on her quest for historical pigments and dyes around the world ... Even drab (technically the tone between olive and puce) seems less so when Finlay examines it (Independent)

It's hard to criticise her spirit of cultural exploration and easy to share her intelligent enthusiasm . . .Packed with pertinent trivia . . . informative and fun (South China Morning Post)

Full of forgotten facts and beguiling anecdotes . . . it would be hard to confront a painting ever again without seeing in it a kind of coded map of the world (Telegraph)

Packed with facts, fables and anecdotes ... Finlay's detailed and brilliantly researched account makes for a fascinating read (Australian Interior Trends)

Victoria Finlay has unlocked the history of colour in this trawl through some little-known history (Courier Mail ( Australia))

An irresistible cornucopia ...Her travels are Marco Polish; her research vast but lightly worn. The whole book is an infectious delight. (RTE Guide)

Part travelogue, part narrative history, 'Colour' unlocks the history of the colours of the rainbow, and reveals how paints came to be invented, discovered, traded and used. This remarkable and beautifully written book remembers a time when red paint was really the colour of blood, when orange was the poison pigment, blue as expensive as gold, and yellow made from the urine of cows force-fed with mangoes. It looks at how green was carried by yaks along the silk road, and how an entire nation was founded on the colour purple.

Exciting, richly informative, and always surprising, 'Colour' lifts the lid on the historical palette and unearths an astonishing wealth of stories about the quest for colours, and our efforts to understand them.