Best Selling Books by Kenneth Clark

Kenneth Clark''s sweeping narrative looks at how Western Europe evolved in the wake of the collapse of the Roman Empire, to produce the ideas, books, buildings, works of art and great individuals that make up our civilisation. The author takes us from Iona in the ninth century to France in the twelfth, from Florence to Urbino, from Germany to Rome, England, Holland and America. Against these historical backgrounds he sketches an extraordinary cast of characters -- the men and women who gave new energy to civilisation and expanded our understanding of the world and of ourselves. He also highlights the works of genius they produced -- in architecture, sculpture and painting, in philosophy, poetry and music, and in science and engineering, from Raphael''s School of Athens to the bridges of Brunel.

Tiles are a beautiful form of ceramic that lend themselves to an extraordinary diversity of uses and treatments. In this outstanding overview, Kenneth Clark, a distinguished tile designer and maker, introduces readers to their creation, ornamentation, and use. Tile making using earthenware, stoneware, porcelain, and paper clay is fully described as are the decorative techniques, like painting, screen printing, and sgraffito. The work of leading tile designers is also examined, along with their approaches and applications. To complete the book, Clark offers practical information on the uses of tile, including floors, walls, roofs, fireplaces, murals, and swimming pools; details on how to repair tiles; and advice on how to protect and care for them. Written by an expert, and with 280 color photos, The Tile is sure to captivate anyone interested in learning or appreciating the skills of this age-old craft.

What is it like to dive in the murky depths of the ocean?How do you raise the wreck of a ship or aircraft?Here, Kenneth Clark relives his diving experiences from training in the 1950s, to being awarded the Gold Sub Aqua Medal by the Duke of Edinburgh.His achievements include helping raise the Gitana from Loch Rannoch in 1978. At the time, it was the heaviest wreck ever salvaged by amateur divers.

Abstract: In a laboratory setting, people viewed simple visual stimuli and chose the categories to which they belonged. A computer tracked people''s choices, confidence ratings, and response times (RTs) when either all alternatives available for a choice were reasonable or one alternative was very unlikely. While the objective probability of an alternative in a set being correct decreases with the introduction of another alternative, I expected that inclusion of an implausible alternative would increase confidence that the alternative chosen was correct. I further suspected that RT would be constant despite changes in the types of alternatives available. Accuracy, confidence, and RT were predominantly unchanged by manipulating alternatives in the choice set. This contradicted two of my hypotheses and the hypotheses of other investigators in this area of research. A final experiment focusing just on confidence obtained more contradictory results, suggesting that people process all combinations of alternatives in a set similarly.