Modern Nature: The Journals of Derek Jarman

"The most beautiful & furious book of all time" (Olivia Laing)

"An essential – urgent – book for the 21st Century" (Hans Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director of the Serpentine Gallery)

"A marvellous, moving book" (Sunday Telegraph)

"Jarman gave his garden a certain narrative; perhaps he treated it a bit like a film or theatre set. His films were visionary, eccentric, romantic and rebellious, all of which could also be said about his garden" (Guardian)

"It's hard not to warm to the man who, in the face of all the personal and professional hardships described in this book, can still regard himself as 'the most fortunate film-maker of my generation" (Guardian)

"The most beautiful & furious book of all time"

"An essential – urgent – book for the 21st Century"

"A marvellous, moving book"

"Jarman gave his garden a certain narrative; perhaps he treated it a bit like a film or theatre set. His films were visionary, eccentric, romantic and rebellious, all of which could also be said about his garden"

"It's hard not to warm to the man who, in the face of all the personal and professional hardships described in this book, can still regard himself as 'the most fortunate film-maker of my generation"

In 1986 the controversial film-maker Derek Jarman discovered he was HIV positive, and decided to make a garden at his cottage on the bleak coast of Dungeness, where he also wrote these journals. Looking back over his childhood, his "coming out" in the 1960s and his cinema career, the book is at once a volume of autobiography, a lament for a lost generation and a celebration of homosexuality.