Red grabs your attention. Today we associate red with danger, sex, anger and more, yet the colour was once so significant that things which have a profound impact upon our lives were widely called red, even though they are often not red at all. In this book, Spike Bucklow looks for the reasons why red, of all the colours, has captured the imagination. The first part considers materials that have produced red, from a shaman’s burial dressings of 34,000 years ago to today’s digital screens. Red could be obtained from animal, vegetable and minerals but there were also the mysterious reds made by medieval alchemists and the high-fashion reds of the nineteenth century that drove the Chemical Revolution. The second part looks at earth, blood and fire, and explores caves and goddesses, holy blood and national flags, metalwork and power grids.