Category Archives: Arts & Literature

Arts/Books: Times Literary Supplement – May 3, 2024

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Times Literary Supplement (May 1, 2024): The latest issue features ‘Making it New’ – A.E. Stallings on the innovative classicism of Anne Carson’s poetry; Salman Rushdie’s memoir of survival; Politics and performance and more…

Previews: Country Life Magazine – May 1, 2024

Country Life Magazine (April 30, 2024): The latest issue features

Local distinctiveness

  • Kate Green and Agnes Stamp take a geological tour of our islands to dig out what makes them special; granite country, chalk downland, The Fens, Wealden clay, Welsh slate, Yorkshire mill-stone grit, The Highlands and Cotswold limestone
  • Matthew Rice sketches the myriad architectural styles
  • Mark Diacono rubs the soil between his fingers
  • Victoria Marston wraps her tongue around dialects
  • Harry Pearson downs a pint or three of local ale
  • And finally, the ultimate quiz

Et in Arcadia ego

For Constable, the countryside was a lover, for Samuel Palmer, it offered an escape from the real world and for Paul Nash it held an inescapable lure. Michael Prodger examines the effect of British landscapes on art

The Duchess of Marlborough’s favourite painting

The ceramicist chooses an evocation of her childhood

Let us now praise the Nanny State

We should embrace Mary Poppins-esque common sense, believes Carla Carlisle

The legacy

Kate Green salutes the 10th Duke of Beaufort on the eve of the Badminton Horse Trials that set British riders on their gallop to three-day-eventing victory

Cometh the ice men

Don’t cast those jumpers out just yet, advises Lia Leendertz

Interiors

Get ready for the warmer weather with Amelia Thorpe’s pick of outdoor furniture

London Life

  • Royal photographs
  • All you need to know about cloth, cheese and Trafalgar Square
  • Jack Watkins tells the tale of Covent Garden
  • Adam Hay-Nicholls relishes the roar of engines in Savile Row

Up hill and down dale

Kathryn Bradley-Hole finds that formality is leavened by verve and personality in the gardens of Dalemain at Penrith, Cumbria, where the blue poppies bloom

Kitchen garden cook

Melanie Johnson gathers bunches of fresh watercress

Native herbs

Unmistakeable in scent, versatile in use, wild garlic is a forager’s dream, but don’t let dairy cows graze it, warns Ian Morton

Travel

  • Mark Hedges escapes to our nearest paradise, the Isles of Scilly
  • Tom Parker Bowles feasts on a proper club sandwich
  • Pamela Goodman dares to swim the Dordogne

The good stuff

Hetty Lintell takes her time choosing the latest wonderful watches unveiled in Geneva

International Art: Apollo Magazine – May 2024 Issue

May 2024 | Apollo Magazine

Apollo Magazine (April 29, 2024): The new May 2024 issue features ‘How national is the National Gallery?’; Alvaro Barrington’s winning hand; Fossil-fuelled: art and the oil industry…

Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – May 6, 2024

Sonny Rollins plays the saxophone on the Brooklyn Bridge.

The New Yorker (April 29, 2024): The new issue‘s cover features Faith Ringgold’s “Sonny’s Bridge, 1986” – The late artist’s work recalls her pioneering spirit through vivid, inventive designs.

Teresita Fernández’s Shifting Sculptural Landscapes

Also: Kamasi Washington, “The Outsiders” reviewed, Bang on a Can’s Long Play Festival, and more.

The Return, Again, of the Power Lunch

Four Twenty Five, a luxe new dining room from the mega-restaurateur Jean-Georges Vongerichten, takes square aim at the expense-account crowd.

Donald Trump’s Sleepy, Sleazy Criminal Trial

The most striking aspect of the former President’s hush-money trial so far has been that, for the first time in a decade, Trump is struggling to command attention.

Previews: Country Life Magazine – April 24, 2024

Country Life Magazine (April 24, 2024): The latest issue features

The summer Season

  • Ben Lerwill looks forward to high-speed sporting action
  • Tom Chamberlin and Sophia Money-Coutts reveal how to keep your cool when the heat is on
  • Hetty Lintell presents glorious ensembles for hot days
  • Paul Henderson asks top chefs for their picnic picks
  • Julie Harding meets the wicker weavers
  • Harry Eyres and the Country Life tasting team find English fizz in sparkling form

Every picture tells a story

As the National Gallery counts down to its 200th anniversary, Carla Passino delves into the fascinating stories behind 10 paintings in the collection

John Booth’s favourite painting

The chairman of the National Gallery board of trustees picks an exquisite, skilful work that resonates with deeper meaning

The private made public

In the second of two articles, John Goodall investigates the 20th-century evolution of Stansted Park in West Sussex

Luxury

Hetty Lintell reveals the secret to staying fresh faced and fashion artist David Downton shares a few of his favourite things

The legacy

Octavia Pollock hails the talented Stevenson clan, who saved countless lives at sea thanks to their prolific lighthouse building

Interiors

Giles Kime on how decorative frames can give a room an extra edge and Arabella Youens on the creation of a family kitchen

Processions, proclamations and punishment

Time has not been kind to way-side crosses, once beacons of the British landscape. Lucien de Guise follows a trail of destruction

Supporting acts

Amelia Thorpe selects the best structures for growing climbers

Kitchen garden cook

Melanie Johnson gets creative with fresh, cooling spearmint

Dropping down to Derwentwater

Lakeland fells form a dramatic backdrop to the captivating Arts-and-Crafts garden at High Moss in Cumbria, finds Non Morris

Satan on six legs

Crushing one is said to absolve you of all your sins, but the Devil’s coach horse beetle is also the gardener’s friend, says Ian Morton

Flying between extremes

A booming bittern and a colossal crane make it a memorable return to the Norfolk Broads for John Lewis-Stempel

Blessed among plants

It may be named after the Virgin Mary, but, warns Ian Morton, there is a hint of the profane about lady’s mantle

Native herbs

John Wright reveals how the pretty, but unpalatable ground ivy found its true calling as an ingredient in the brewing of ale

Arts/Books: Times Literary Supplement – April 26, 2024

Times Literary Supplement (April 24, 2024): The latest issue features ‘The Mormon Conquest’ – Seth Perry on a people of the book; Is ‘green growth’ a mirage; Virginia Woolf’s rural retreat; China’s Shakespeare…

Literary Preview: n+1 Magazine – Spring 2024

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@nplusonemag (April 23, 2024): The latest issue features ‘Passage’ – Fast fashion nation. Six months of genocide in Gaza. Human_Fallback_2: 2 Human 2 Fallback. Martin Amis, re-reassessed. Border stories by Nicholas Hamburger and Paul Soto.

Who Sees Gaza?

A genocide in images



OCTOBER 7 MARKED the beginning of a new economy of war imagery. At first there was a video of a bulldozer plowing through the border fence between Israel and Gaza—an astonishing image, captured in a familiar way. Then things turned horribly surreal. The events of that day were beamed to the world in real time via body-cam, dashcam, cell phone, drone. A Hamas fighter wearing a GoPro stalked the highway with his automatic rifle jutting up from the bottom of the frame, first-person-shooter style. A dashboard camera showed a car zooming forward as a bullet pierced its windshield and the car began to drift, veering left, until it crashed into the rear end of a parked Toyota; you knew exactly when the person behind the wheel could no longer drive, was probably dead. 

The New York Times Book Review – April 21, 2024

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THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (April 20, 2024): The latest issue features….

Coddling Plus Devices? Unequivocal Disaster for Our Kids.

In “The Anxious Generation,” Jonathan Haidt says we’re failing children — and takes a firm stand against tech.

In this photo-illustration, a child sits on a seesaw set in a field of emerald green grass. On the other side of the seesaw is a giant smartphone.

By Tracy Dennis-Tiwary

THE ANXIOUS GENERATION: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, by Jonathan Haidt

Quick! Someone Get This Book a Doctor.

Inside the book conservation lab at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

By Molly Young

Not every workplace features a guillotine. At a book conservation lab tucked beneath the first floor of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the office guillotine might as well be a water cooler or a file cabinet for all that it fazes the staff. “We have a lot of violent equipment,” said Mindell Dubansky, who heads the Sherman Fairchild Center for Book Conservation.

How the Rich and Poor Once Saw War

In “Muse of Fire,” Michael Korda depicts the lives and passions of the soldier poets whose verse provided a view into the carnage of World War I.

Reviews: ‘The Week In Art’

The Week In Art Podcast (April 19, 2024): We are back in Venice for the latest edition of the biggest biennial in the world of art. The 60th Venice Biennale comprises an international exhibition featuring more than 300 artists, dozens of national pavilions in the Giardini—the gardens at the eastern end of the city—and the Arsenale—the historic shipyards of the Venetian Republic—and host of official collateral exhibitions and other shows and interventions across Venice.

The Art Newspaper’s contemporary art correspondent, Louisa Buck, editor-at-large Jane Morris and host Ben Luke review the international exhibition, Foreigners Everywhere/Stranieri Ovunque, curated by the Brazilian artistic director, Adriano Pedrosa. We talk to artists and curators behind five national pavilions—Jeffrey Gibson in the US pavilion, John Akomfrah in the British pavilion, Romuald Hazoumè in the Benin pavilion, Gustavo Caboco Wapichana, the curator of the Hãhãwpuá or Brazilian pavilion, and Valeria Montii Colque in the Chilean pavilion—about their presentations.

And we like to end our Venice specials by responding to an example of the historic work that made la Serenissima one of the world’s great centres for art. So for this episode’s Work of the Week, Ben Luke gained exclusive access to one of the most significant paintings in Venetian history: the Assunta or Assumption of the Virgin made between 1516 and 1518 by Titian. Since the last Biennale in 2022, the Assunta has been unveiled after a four-year conservation project, funded by the charity Save Venice. We spoke to the man who restored this incomparable masterpiece, Giulio Bono, right beneath Titian’s painting.

Arts & Literature: Kenyon Review – Spring 2024

Richie Hofmann (@RichieHof) / X

Kenyon Review – April 19, 2024: The 2024 Spring issue features Beth Bachmann’s 2023 Short Fiction Contest-winning story, chosen by judge Danielle Evans; fiction by Nick Almeida and Lauren Cassani Davis; poetry by Fatima Jafar and Marcus Wicker; and a folio of Literary Curiosities, which features work by Jennifer ChangJ. D. DebrisSummer FarahEliza GilbertChristine ImperialPhoebe Peter OathoutTega OghenechovwenMaya C. Popa, and more. The cover art is a detail of Chitra Ganesh’s City Inside Her, from the artist’s Architects of the Future portfolio.