Enter The Madman’s Gallery…

By John Freeman on November 25, 2025 • ( 0 )

Edward Brooke-Hitching’s 2022 book, The Madman’s Gallery, offering an eccentric exploration through the curious history of art, is currently on sale at considerable discount from various online sellers, including PS Books.

Alongside the masterpieces of Western art runs an alternative canon of the mysterious, scandalous and downright weird. The Madman’s Gallery reproduces and explains a hundred such oddities, including Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights, Arcimboldo’s bizarre portraits composed of fruit and vegetables, Piranesi’s imaginary prisons, and the Surrealism of Dalí and Magritte alongside more obscure examples, such as Ferdinand Cheval’s Ideal Temple, built over 33 years with pebbles he collected on his rounds as a postman.

Published by Simon & Schuster, it’s pitched as “the perfect gift book for any art lover”. Discover an eccentric exploration through the curious history of art, to find the strangest paintings, sculptures, drawings and other artistic oddities ever made.

This unique exhibition gathers more than a hundred magnificent works, each chosen for their striking beauty, weirdness and captivating story behind their creation.

Obscure and forgotten treasures sit alongside famous masterpieces with secret stories to tell. Here are Doom paintings, screaming sculptures, magical manuscripts, impossible architecture, dog-headed saints, angel musketeers and the first portrait of a cannibal. Stolen art, outsider art, ghost art, revenge art, and art painted at the bottom of the sea take their place alongside scandalous art, forgeries and hoaxes, art of dreams and nightmares, and cryptic paintings yet to be decoded.

Discover the remarkable Elizabethan portraits of men in flames, the mystery of the nude Mona Lisa, the gruesome ingredients of lost pigments, the werewolf legion of the Roman army, and the Italian monk who levitated so often he’s recognised as the patron saint of aeroplane passengers.

• Check out The Madman’s Gallery here at PS Books

• Check out The Madman’s Gallery here at AmazonUK (Affiliate Link)

Edward Brooke-Hitching is a screenwriter and bestselling author of adult and children’s nonfiction titles, including The Madman’s Library (Sunday Times Literary Book of the Year 2020, BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week), along with the Simon and Schuster non-fiction works Love: A Curious History, The Devil’s Atlas, The Sky Atlas, The Golden Atlas (both shortlisted for Edward Stanford Writing Awards), The Phantom Atlas, and Fox Tossing, Octopus Wrestling and Other Forgotten Sports.

His latest titles include The Most Interesting Book in the World, an “everlasting gobstopper” collection of curious facts, stories and illustrations, and the children’s titles, What’s the Weirdest…? series (Bloomsbury, 2025) and 365 Amazing True Things to Read in Bed (Quarto, 2025),

The Time Machine is Out of Control! series launches from Bloomsbury, next year.

Edward spent six years as a fact-finder and scriptwriter for the BBC TV show QI before leaving to write books full time. His work has featured in The Guardian, The Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Literary Review and others. He has appeared on shows including BBC Radio 4’s Museum of Curiosity, Start the Week with Andrew Marr, and the Radio 2 Arts Show with Jonathan Ross.

The son of an antiquarian book dealer and an elected Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, he lives with his red Labrador Annie Jump Cannon in a dusty heap of old maps and books in Berkshire, where he gardens poorly and practises sword-swallowing even less successfully.

About the Author
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John Freeman

John is the founder of downthetubes, launched in 1998. He is a comics and magazine editor, writer, and Press Officer for the Lakes International Comic Art Festival. He also runs Crucible Comic Press.

Working in British comics publishing since the 1980s, his credits include editor of titles such as Doctor Who Magazine and Overkill for Marvel UK, Babylon 5 Magazine, Star Trek Magazine, and its successor, Star Trek Explorer, and more. He also edited the comics anthology STRIP Magazine and edited several audio comics for ROK Comics; and has edited several comic collections and graphic novels, including volumes of “Charley’s War” and “Dan Dare”, and Hancock: The Lad Himself, by Stephen Walsh and Keith Page.

He’s the writer of comics such as Pilgrim: Secrets and Lies for B7 Comics; “Crucible”, a creator-owned project with 2000AD artist Smuzz; and “Death Duty” and “Skow Dogs”, with Dave Hailwood.