Behold the Leshantang collection, a testament to the eye of Tsai I-Ming, spanning the sweep of history from earliest dynasties to the modern era, this principle has guided the evolution of artistic expression.
Category Archives: Arts & Literature
London Review Of Books – April 4, 2024 Preview
Mary Wellesley – Mother Tongue: The Surprising History of Women’s Words by Jenni Nuttall
Moshé Machover, James McAuley, Avital Balwit, Brian Vickers, Pat Butcher, Joe Oldaker, Arthur M. Shapiro, Penny Collier, John Potts
Mike Jay – Mapping the Darkness: The Visionary Scientists Who Unlocked the Mysteries of Sleep by Kenneth Miller
T.J. Clark – Poem: ‘Clapham in March’
Michael Ledger-Lomas: Andrew Lang: Writer, Folklorist, Democratic Intellect by John SloanTroubled by Faith: Insanity and the Supernatural in the Age of the Asylum by Owen Davies
Michael Hofmann – The Islander: A Biography of Halldór Laxness by Halldór Guðmundsson, translated by Philip Roughton
Brandon Taylor – Is it even good?
Previews: Country Life Magazine – March 27, 2024
Country Life Magazine – March 27, 2024: The latest issue features:
A prickly subject
Marianne Taylor examines how we can help to halt the worrying decline of the humble hedgehog, Britain’s favourite mammal
Country Life International
- John Lewis-Stempel reflects on an old way of life in rural France
- Russell Higham visits Mozart’s Italian muse
- Arabella Youens hails Mondrian’s De Stijl movement
- Tom Parker Bowles celebrates Greek cuisine
- Holly Kirkwood selects the best Iberian properties for sale
- Eileen Reid explores love and logic in Paris
Bold and beautiful
Charles Quest-Ritson is wowed by the woodland garden created during the past two decades at Broughton Grange, Oxfordshire
Home is where the art is
Iron-man Sir Antony Gormley is taking over Houghton Hall in Norfolk with 100 life-size figures, as Charlotte Mullins discovers
The Very Reverend Dr David Hoyle’s favourite painting
The Dean of Westminster picks a striking work that is all about looking — and then looking again
A silent witness
In the first of two articles, John Goodall visits Lancing College Chapel, West Sussex, a masterpiece 154 years in the making
The legacy: Roy Plomley
Kate Green tunes in for Roy Plomley’s Desert Island Discs
A real nest egg
John Lewis-Stempel marvels at one of the smallest, yet mightiest miracles in the natural world
Room with a pew
Your seat in church once told a lot about your status in the parish, reveals Andrew Green
Once more into the abyss
It’s a dirty job, but someone’s got to do it: John Lewis-Stempel hauls an errant heifer from a ditch
The Editor’s Easter quiz
Spring has sprung — how many native wildflowers can you name?
Luxury
Hetty Lintell explores exquisite gilets, bespoke tailoring and sparkling aquamarine jewellery
Interiors
Giles Kime is armed with a crystal ball for his latest building project
Kitchen garden cook
Melanie Johnson on spinach
Don’t mock them
Plant a Philadelphus, says John Hoyland, and enjoy an explosion of blooms and scent this summer
And much more
Arts/Books: Times Literary Supplement-March 29, 2024
Times Literary Supplement (March 27, 2024): The latest issue features ‘Illustrating Ray Bradbury’ – Michael Caines on a writer who transcended genre; Fifteen French Kings; Spy stories; Neel Mukherjee’s art and artifice; Space colonization and Andrew O’Hagan on the Cally Road….
International Art: Apollo Magazine – April 2024
Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – April 1, 2024
Bryan Stevenson Reclaims the Monument, in the Heart of the Deep South
The civil-rights attorney has created a museum, a memorial, and, now, a sculpture park, indicting the city of Montgomery—a former capital of the domestic slave trade and the cradle of the Confederacy.
The National Monument to Freedom, in Montgomery, Alabama, is a giant book, standing forty-three feet high and a hundred and fifty feet wide. The book is propped wide open, and engraved on its surface are the names of more than a hundred and twenty thousand Black people, documented in the 1870 census, who were emancipated after the Civil War. On the spine of the book is a credo written for the dead:
A Dutch Architect’s Vision of Cities That Float on Water
Your children love you.
The country you built must honor you.
We acknowledge the tragedy of your enslavement.
We commit to advancing freedom in your name.
What if building on the water could be safer and sturdier than building on flood-prone land?
By Kyle Chayka
In a corner of the Rijksmuseum hangs a seventeenth-century cityscape by the Dutch Golden Age painter Gerrit Berckheyde, “View of the Golden Bend in the Herengracht,” which depicts the construction of Baroque mansions along one of Amsterdam’s main canals. Handsome double-wide brick buildings line the Herengracht’s banks, their corniced façades reflected on the water’s surface. Interspersed among the new homes are spaces, like gaps in a young child’s smile, where vacant lots have yet to be developed.
The New York Times Book Review – March 24, 2024
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (March 23, 2024):
In Téa Obreht’s Latest, a Refugee Seeks Home in a Ruined World
“The Morningside” reckons with climate change and its fallout while finding hope in the stories we preserve.
By Jessamine Chan
THE MORNINGSIDE, by Téa Obreht
The elegant, effortless world-building in Téa Obreht’s haunting new novel, “The Morningside,” begins with a map. Island City resembles Manhattan, but alarmingly smaller, the borders of the city redrawn by the rising water. There’s the River to the east, the Bay to the west. Here, hurricanes and tides have made building collapse a constant danger, the freeway is visible only on low-tide days, food is government rations, the wealthy have fled “upriver to scattered little freshwater townships,” and gigantic birds called rook cranes are everywhere.
An Exquisite Biography of a Gilded Age Legend
In Natalie Dykstra’s hands, the life of Isabella Stewart Gardner is a tribute to the power of art.
CHASING BEAUTY: The Life of Isabella Stewart Gardner, by Natalie Dykstra
Bright, impetuous and obsessed with beautiful things, Isabella Stewart Gardner led a life out of a Gilded Age novel. Born into a wealthy New York family, she married into an even wealthier Boston one when she wed John Lowell Gardner in 1860, only to be ostracized by her adopted city’s more conservative denizens, who found her self-assurance and penchant for “jollification” a bit much.
Luminous Fables in a Land of Loss
Téa Obreht’s stunning debut novel, “The Tiger’s Wife,” is a hugely ambitious, audaciously written work that provides an indelible picture of life in an unnamed Balkan country still reeling from the fallout of civil war. At the same time it explores the very essence of storytelling and the role it plays in people’s lives, especially when they are “confounded by the extremes” of war and social upheaval and need to somehow “stitch together unconnected events in order to understand” what is happening around them.
Arts/Culture: Humanities Magazine – Spring 2024
Humanities Magazine – Spring 2024 Issue:
It’s Dante’s Hell—We’re Just Living In It
The great Italian poet, in light of a new documentary
Qui est per omnia secula benedictus are the final words of La Vita Nuova, Dante Alighieri’s collection of poetry and prose.
The Latin renders to “who is blessed for ever” and concludes an enigmatic, brief paragraph. First published in 1294, La Vita Nuova is a tantalizing prelude to the Florentine poet’s masterpiece, La Commedia, known today as The Divine Comedy. For centuries, readers and scholars have pored over La Vita Nuova (Italian for, literally, the new life)—convinced, as we often are, that a gifted writer’s nascent work contains the answers to longstanding mysteries.
City of Stories
How I Created a Picture Book About Rome
“Building Stories,” the new exhibition at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., explores themes of architecture, construction, and design through children’s books, such as Rome Antics by David Macaulay.
I first met Rome as a student in 1968. Rome is complicated and demanding and can be overwhelming—especially if you are homesick. Eventually, the riches and surprises of the imperial city will render all attempts to keep one’s distance useless. I didn’t realize how attached I had become until a few years later.
Arts/Books: Times Literary Supplement-March 22, 2024
Times Literary Supplement (March 22, 2024): The latest issue features ‘All the Lonely People’ – Charles Foster on a modern-day epidemic; Shakespeare and Bloomsbury; D.H. Lawrence, cuckhold; Marilynne Robinson’s god; Paul Theroux’s Orwell…
Previews: Country Life Magazine – March 20, 2024
Country Life Magazine – March 20, 2024: The latest issue features:
Riding to the rescue
James Alexander-Sinclair hails the remarkable revival of the gardens at Dowdeswell Court, Gloucestershire, the charming Cotswolds home of Jade Holland Cooper and Julian Dunkerton
The cutting-garden diaries
In the second of a series of articles, Oxfordshire flower grower Anna Brown shares her tips on creating a floral spring spectacular
Great nurseries
Growing sweet violets has been a family passion since 1866 at Groves Nursery in Bridport, Dorset, as Tilly Ware discovers
‘After everything they do, we owe them’
Service dogs and horses risk life and limb to keep us safe. Katy Birchall salutes the work of a charity supporting these animal heroes in retirement
Mark Cocker’s favourite painting
The Nature writer lauds a work by a masterful wildlife painter
Where traffic stops for sacred cows
Dairy farmer Jamie Blackett is heartened to witness cattle worship on a trip to Rajasthan
New series: The legacy
In the third instalment of this new series, Kate Green celebrates the Revd John Russell’s role in the emergence of the terrier
The very nature of Middle-earth
James Clarke visits the magical Malvern Hills to explore a land-scape that so inspired Tolkien
Planters punch
Amelia Thorpe picks garden pots that make a sizeable statement
The good stuff
Hetty Lintell ushers in spring with a selection of floral favourites
Interiors
Soak up the style with an array of elegant bathroom fittings and furnishings from Amelia Thorpe
Kitchen garden cook
Fresh spring onions steal the show, says Melanie Johnson
Grandeur in granite
The restored Cluny Castle in Aberdeenshire is equipped for a future as prosperous as its colourful past, finds John Goodall
It’s a kind of dark magic
Whitby jet and mourning go hand in hand, but is it time to reassess this beautiful heritage gemstone, asks Harry Pearson
How to revive a classic
Michael Billington puts himself in the director’s chair as he ponders spectacular remakes of plays by Ibsen and Chekhov
Back to square one
What is it about cryptic crosswords that has kept us racking our brains for the past 100 years? Rob Crossan has all the answers
Boomers Daily 