In May 1937 a man in his early thirties waits by the lift of a Leningrad apartment block. He waits all through the night, expecting to be taken away to the Big House. Any celebrity he has known in the previous decade is no use to him now. And few who are taken to the Big House ever return. So begins Julian Barnes' first novel since his Booker-winning The Sense of an Ending. A story about the collision of Art and Power, about human compromise, human cowardice and human courage, it is the work of a true master.

At the beginning of the Second World War the Ministry of Information, through the advice of Kenneth Clark, commissioned Cecil Beaton to photograph the Home Front. Beaton set to work recording the destruction of the Wren churches in the City and the heroism of Londoners under attack. He conducted a survey of Bomber and Fighter Commands for the RAF, which was published with Beaton's own astute commentary. Beaton was an effective propagandist, but his voice, like his photographs, was touchingly elegant. Whatever his subject, Beaton was always a stylist. Beaton's wartime work for the Ministry amounted to seven thousand photographs, which are now housed with their negatives at the Imperial War Museums. They form a great document both of the landscape of war and of the passing of the Empire. He travelled through the Western Desert and on to Iraq, Palestine, Transjordan and Syria. In 1943 he left for India where he photographed the final days of the Raj in New Delhi and Calcutta before joining the Burma campaign. He ended the war deep in Chinese territory where he witnessed the Nationalist resistance to the Japanese. Beaton's inherent sense of theatre extended from palatial drawing rooms to the jungle and the desert. Whatever the circumstances he never departed from his radical aesthetic. Theatre of War is published in conjunction with the Imperial War Museums on the occasion of a major exhibition.

Alexander Barabanov, a key figure in the Russian dance world, has sifted through many thousands of photographs of dance to accumulate an extraordinary collection of pictures, ranging from historical ballet photographs to shocking avant-garde imagery. This work has been collected and edited to form an astonishing sequence. Rather than being assembled as an anthology, the sequence has in fact been 'choreographed' so the book is constructed to form a dance in ten movements. It begins with creation myths, follows erotic engagements and leads to a series of mass movements in the modern age. It includes such gems as the young Nureyev's first performance with the Kirov and Baryshinikov's debut as well as images with brutal reference to Abu Ghraib or the march of fascism.

In Paris in 1934, a young and beautiful Jewish emigree, Gerda Pohorylles, met a Hungarian political exile, Andre Friedmann. They reinvented themselves as the photographers Gerda Taro and Robert Capa — and he would become the most important photojournalist of his generation. When Gerda was killed in the Spanish Civil war at the age of twenty-six, Robert Capa was her most notable mourner — his grief was beyond control. Her funeral drew crowds of thousands and she became a hero of the political left. Despite the legend that was built around her, she subsequently became a mere footnote in Capa's story. Seventy years after her death a long-lost suitcase was discovered in Mexico, containing thousands of negatives by Capa and Taro. Most astonishingly of all, the 'Mexican suitcase' showed that photographs that had been attributed previously to Capa were, in fact, the work of Taro. Jane Rogoyska's book will trace Taro's life and reveal the depth of her relationship with Capa. Charismatic and extraordinary, they epitomised one of the most tumultuous periods of the century.

In 1965, Lennart Nilsson published images from inside the human uterus, the first photographs of prenatal life. The book that was to follow, A Child is Born, stunned the world — offering an unprecedented glimpse at the unseen world within our bodies, and our own beginnings. Using high-definition ultrasound technique, scanning electron and light microscopes, and advanced fibre optics Lennart Nilsson documents the miracle of human reproduction: the egg travelling down the fallopian tube; the sperm racing to meet it; the moment of fertilization; the very first cell division; the tiny embryo attaching to the uterine wall; the growth of eyes, ears, fingers and toes; and, finally the moment of delivery itself — providing an astonishing glimpse of the first moments of life. In this, the fully revised fifth edition, A Child is Born is redefined for a new age. With a completely new accompanying text, the images are rendered in astonishing detail utilising revolutionary new photographic technology, with the photographs themselves the dominant driving force of the narrative.