Times Literary Supplement (November 27, 2024): The latest issue features ‘Mutti Knows Best?’ – Angela Merkel’s triumph and tragedy; Gaughin’s uncensored thoughts; Gladiator II; C.S. Lewis’s Oxford and “The Magic Mountain” at 100…
Category Archives: Arts & Literature
Country Life Magazine – November 27, 2024 Preview


Country Life Magazine (November 26, 2024): The latest issue features ‘Advent Calendar Special’…
The master builder
Carla Passino is captivated by floral photographs that evoke 17th-century still-life paintings
A little mite with a mighty heart
She may be tiny, but Jenny wren certainly makes her presence felt, declares Mark Cocker
Worth its weight in gold
There’s more to myrrh than meets the eye, says Deborah Nicholls-Lee
Now that packs a punch
Lucien de Guise is bowled over by the intoxicating concoctions mixed by Dickens and George IV
Pie say!
Neil Buttery tucks into the tale of the Yorkshire Christmas Pye
Christmas gifts
Pick out those perfect presents with a helping hand from Hetty Lintell and Amie Elizabeth White

Mayara Magri’s favourite painting
The Royal Ballet dancer selects an inspiring, transformative work
Hardy and the country house
The author’s Wessex is brought to life in Jeremy Musson’s words and Matthew Rice’s drawings
Beauty by numbers
Deborah Nicholls-Lee is fascinated by fractals, the exquisite, ever-repeating patterns in Nature
The fall of Albion
John Lewis-Stempel urges us to rediscover our love of heathland, now a rarer habitat than rainforest
Get a Grip
Andrew Green rounds up the animals in Dickens’s life and work
First out of the lychgate
Jack Watkins explores the folklore and function of the lychgate
Little things that make a big difference
Our guide to entertaining in style
Thank you for the memories
From flying a Spitfire to sushi-making, the COUNTRY LIFE team puts gift experiences to the test
The legacy
Kate Green reveals how Sir David Willcocks changed the sound of Christmas with Carols for Choirs
Luxury
Hetty Lintell on saunas, socks, silk bows and precious stones
Now we’re just some gadgets that you used to know
Neil Buttery sorts the pudding prick from the tongue press
Lid pro quo
Rob Crossan talks Tupperware
Kitchen garden cook
Melanie Johnson on cabbage
It’s always darkest before the dawn
A black fox illuminates a dreary dawn for John Lewis-Stempel
Let’s go to the movies
Victoria Marston looks back at classic film posters
It takes the biscuit
Matthew Dennison explores the tin-novations that made Huntley & Palmers a household name
Forever a chorister
Sarah Sands shares how choral singing shaped the life of her late brother Kit Hesketh-Harvey
‘What a good boy am I’
Ian Morton investigates the real meanings of our nursery rhymes
The great astral sneeze
Harry Pearson finds out why this is the year of the Northern Lights
International Art: Apollo Magazine – December 2024
Apollo Magazine (October 28, 2024): The new issue features ‘Rachel Ruysch Says it with Flowers’
In this issue
• The floral paintings of Rachel Ruysch
• What do museums think about climate protests?
• Turin’s Egyptian Museum at 200
• The winners of the Apollo Awards 2024
Also: An interview with Jeff Wall, the wild imagination of Maurice Sendak, spies and socialists at the Isokon building, and the ever-closer ties between luxury brands and the art world; reviews of Jacopo Bassano in Helsinki, art along the Silk Roads, the colourful interiors of Pierre Bonnard, and the art of predicting the future. Plus: John Banville on the sensuality of a late Rubens
Preview: The New Yorker Magazine – Dec. 2, 2024

The New Yorker (November24, 2024): The latest issue features Tom Toro’s “Incognito” – Putting on a friendly face.
The Fundamental Problem with R.F.K., Jr.,’s Nomination to H.H.S.
Kennedy has many bad ideas. Yet the irony of our political moment is that his more reasonable positions are the ones that could sink his candidacy. By Dhruv Khullar
How Old Age Was Reborn
“The Golden Girls” reframed senior life as being about socializing and sex. But did the cultural narrative of advanced age as continued youth twist the dial too far? By Daniel Immerwahr
How to Make Fuel (or Booze) from Thin Air
Air Company, a startup that has used water and carbon dioxide to make vodka and to power automobiles, taste-tests its product and discusses getting Elon Musk’s business. By Adam Iscoe
Art Profiles: The Genius Of Auguste Renoir (1841-1919)
DW History and Culture (November 21, 2024): Discover the trailblazing spirit of Auguste Renoir, one of the founders of impressionism, whose canvases shattered centuries of artistic convention. In “Renoir – Portrait of Changing Times,” we see how Renoir took inspiration from the past, while transforming Parisian life undergoing societal change into timeless masterpieces.
Renoir’s impressionistic strokes capture the pulse of 1870s Paris, a city reeling from war and revolutionary change, whilst incorporating Rococo references. This documentary explores the genesis of Renoir’s vision, which melds tradition with the avant-garde. As his son later wrote, “Renoir loved fairy tales.
The everyday was like a fairy tale to him”. Like the fairytale world of Rococo Painting, Renoir’s impressionist works do not depict reality but create an alluring and beautiful fiction that still captures the imagination today.
Country Life Magazine – November 20, 2024 Preview


Country Life Magazine (November 20, 2024): The latest issue features Winston Churchill – The wit and wisdom of the great man…
‘Let us go forward together’

As we approach the 150th anniversary of Sir Winston Churchill’s birthday, Amie Elizabeth White and Octavia Pollock pay homage to the great man, in his own words.
Entertaining His Majesty
In the second of two articles, John Goodall charts the 1560s and 1620s expansion of Apethorpe Palace in Northamptonshire
Landscape of ‘seamless sameness’
England’s heather moorland and its glorious purple swathe is a wonder of the Western world, suggest John Lewis-Stempel
Why is a raven like a writing desk?
Do you know a Yonerywander from a Vinvertuperator? Engage your inner Edward Lear as Daniel McKay welcomes you into his wacky world of whimwondery
Wibble wobble, wibble wobble, jelly made of paint

Food, glorious food is fuelling the creativity of modern still-life artists discovers Catriona Gray
Sex, lies and sewing machines
The sewing machine rose to be an emblem of domesticity, but its invention is a story of Saints and Singers. Matthew Dennison follows the thread
Interiors
Raze to the ground or renovate? Has the open-plan layout had its day? Cart shed or garage? Giles Kime considers some key architectural conundrums
Wisley reinvented

John Hoyland is captivated by the spectacular transformation of Piet Oudolf’s double borders at the RHS garden in Surrey
Some like it hot
If you like your chili ‘hotter than the hinges of hell’, Tom Parker Bowles has just the dish for you (and there’s not a bean in sight)
Wooden walls restored

John Goodall lauds a decade-long project to rescue a unique painted church at Ursi, Romania
Arts/Books: Times Literary Supplement – Nov. 22, 2024
Times Literary Supplement (November 20, 2024): The latest issue features ‘The Uncommon Reader’ – Virginia Woolf in literary tradition..
What we want from her books
Virginia Woolf as reader, writer and literary inspiration By Sophie Oliver
A star is torn
The unravelling of Vivien Leigh’s marriage amid her mental health breakdown By Vanessa Curtis
Ignorant armies
History as an ideological battleground By Niall Ferguson
Bergson’s boom and bust
How the world’s most famous thinker fell out of fashion By Mark Sinclair
Preview: The New Yorker Magazine – Nov. 18, 2024

The New Yorker (November 18, 2024): The latest issue features Javier Mariscal’s “Desk with a View” – Sudden glimpses of urban artistry.
Javier Mariscal’s “Desk with a View”
Sudden glimpses of urban artistry. By Françoise MoulyArt by Javier Mariscal
Why N.S.A. Rules Say No to Smartphones, No to Texting, Yes to Podcasts
The agency, known for listening, is getting into the (extremely vetted) talking game, with “No Such Podcast.”
Art: Picasso’s ‘Masterful Contradictions’ (1925)
Sotheby’s (November 17, 2024):In late September of 1925, Pablo Picasso, his wife Olga and their young son Paolo returned to Paris from their annual summer holiday in the South of France.
The summers were beginning to blend together for Picasso, who was tiring of the swell set he and Olga socialized with. The home they returned to at 23 rue la Boetie was a changed one. After lengthy negotiations, Picasso had acquired an additional floor of the building to be used as his studio.
He set about immediately modifying the space: removing doors from their hinges, bringing in his copious art supplies (and a limited amount of furniture) and stripping back most of the existing wallpaper. After years of jostling with his elegant and socially aspirational wife for space in their apartment on the floor below he relished a place to colonize as his own.
The New York Times Book Review – November 17, 2024

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (November 17, 2024): The latest issue features ‘Who’s Johnny?’…
‘Carson the Magnific: Where’s Johnny? The Biography of a TV Host Whose Life Was a Closed Book.
Johnny Carson dominated late-night television for decades, but closely guarded his privacy. Bill Zehme’s biography, “Carson the Magnificent,” tries to break through.ent,’ by Bill Zehme
Combined Print & E-Book Fiction – Best Sellers
Rankings on weekly lists reflect sales for the week ending November 2, 2024.