I thought everything would change, after the war. And now, no one even mentions it. It is as if we all got together in private and said whatever you do don't mention that, like it never happened. It's the late 1940s. Calm has returned to London and five people are recovering from the chaos of war. In scenes set in a quiet dating agency, a bombed-out church and a prison cell, the stories of these five lives begin to intertwine and we uncover the desire and regret that has bound them together. Sarah Waters's story of illicit love and everyday heroism takes us from a dazed and shattered post-war Britain back into the heart of the Blitz, towards the secrets that are hidden there. Olivier-nominated playwright Hattie Naylor has created a thrilling and theatrically inventive adaptation of a great modern novel. The stage adaptation of The Night Watch was premiered at the Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester, on 16 May 2016.

The phenomenal Russian bestseller. A vampire novel set in a richly realized post-Soviet Moscow, The Night Watch has sold across Europe and to 20th Century Fox for huge advances. In The Night Watch, the first of a trilogy, and reminiscent of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials in its ambitions and achievement, the setting is contemporary Moscow. A small number of Muscovites with supernatural powers — those who are Other, owing allegiance either to the Dark or the Light — co-exist in an uneasy truce, each side keeping a close eye on the other’s activities around the city. Anton, an Other on the side of the Light, is a night-watchman, patrolling the streets and Metro of the city as he protects ordinary people from the vampires of the Dark. On his rounds, Anton comes across a young woman, Svetlana, whom he realizes is under a curse that threatens the entire city, and a boy, Igor, a young Other, as yet unaware of his own enormous power. Partnered by Olga, an Other who is in the form of an owl, he struggles to remove the curse and thereby save the city, while at the same time prevent Igor from falling into the clutches of the Dark. The Night Watch explores the nature of good and evil and the tensions between the individual and the collective in a gripping narrative that owes as much to The Master and Margarita as it is does to the richly realized worlds of Philip Pullman and Tolkien.

A practical guide to viewing the universe.

A landmark book that casts critical light on one of Rembrandt’s most iconic paintings In The Nightwatch, Rembrandt turns his portrayal of eighteen prominent Amsterdam citizens as members of a militia company into one of the world’s most fascinating works of art, one that evokes censure as well as praise. The painting, however, was not an eccentric vision but a thoughtful reworking of a longstanding tradition of militia portraiture. In this classic book, Egbert Haverkamp-Begemann shows how Rembrandt chose motifs, colors, actions, and setting to emphasize the historic role of the militia in Amsterdam and the social standing of the men portrayed, and how contemporary viewers associated costumes and actions with events of the past and familiar circumstances of the period when the painting was made. Meticulously reconstructing the artist’s intentions and the viewer’s response, Haverkamp-Begemann sheds critical light on the startling young woman in gold and other visual elements of this remarkable work.

When Patrick Modiano was awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize for LIterature he was praised for using the 'art of memory' to bring to life the Occupation of Paris during the Second World War. The Night Watch is his second novel and tells the story of a young man of limited means, caught between his work for the French Gestapo informing on the Resistance, and his work for a Resistance cell informing on the police and the black market dealers whose seedy milieu of nightclubs, prostitutes and spivs he shares. Under pressure from both sides to inform and bring things to a crisis, he finds himself driven towards an act of self-sacrifice as the only way to escape an impossible situation and the question that haunts him – how to be a traitor without being a traitor. In this astonishing, cruel and tender book, Modiano attempts to exorcise the past by leading his characters out on a fantasmagoric patrol during one fatal night of the Occupation.

* The Night Watch, along with Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, is one of the most famous paintings in the world. Discover all the secrets and techniques revealed during the recent restoration of this masterpiece at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam* Scientific research and expert opinions made accessible to a general publicThis lavishly illustrated book records the high profile restoration of Rembrandt van Rijn's 17th century masterpiece, The Night Watch, one of the world's most famous paintings. Many questions about the creation of this work have been answered by extensive technical studies done in conjunction with the restoration. The popular Dutch TV program The Secret of the Master has documented the restoration of The Night Watch in four episodes, assisted in this by various external specialists. This book, by the producer of that series, reveals the many secrets of this fascinating and important work.

Noel Kerns is a Texas-based photographer who specializes in capturing ghost towns, decommissioned military bases, and industrial abandonments by night. His images incorporate two distinct photographic techniques: time-exposure by the natural light of a full moon, and the artful application of artificial light, vividly painted into the scene while the cameras shutter is open. Light-painting is all about vision, says Kerns. Or more accurately, pre-vision. Its the ability to imagine the scene you want to emerge from the darkness, and then to execute it in such a way as to match or surpass what you imagined. Nightwatch: Painting with Light is the first book from Kerns, one of the worlds foremost practitioners of the art of light-painting. Join him as he ventures into the darkness of the American Southwest, exploring remote desert ghost towns under a full moon, or prowling the abandoned, seemingly post-apocalyptic structures of Americas industrial wastelands. In his photographs, Kerns captures the world surreal: flowing cloud-streaks in a night sky, the laser-like light trails of cars racing by on a highway, a raging ocean shoreline rendered eerily calm through long exposure.