Category Archives: Reviews

Fine Art: The Burlington Magazine – January 2024

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The Burlington Magazine – January 3, 2024: The new issue features ‘The Golden Age of Avignon’ – Avignon as ‘New Rome’; Rubens and women; Tiepolo in New York; Gertrude Stein and Picasso, and more….

China’s Southern Paradise: Treasures from the Lower Yangzi Delta

A vivid photograph of a lotus pond ushers visitors into this ambitious exhibition on the arts and culture of Jiangnan. Lying to the south of the Yangtze – its name literally means ‘south of the river’ – this part of China includes such major cities as Shanghai, Hangzhou and Suzhou. Curated by Clarissa von Spee, Chair of Asian Art and the James and Donna Reid Curator of Chinese Art at the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA), this is the first exhibition outside China to present an encyclopaedic view of the cultural history of this historically affluent region. 

The Walpole Society

Ever since the Walpole Society was founded in London in 1911 ‘with the object of promoting the study of the history of British art’, The Burlington Magazine has taken a close interest in an organisation with aims and principles so close to our own: this is the sixth Editorial we have devoted to the subject. The first, written by the art historian August F. Jaccaci, who edited the Magazine’s ‘Art in America’ section, appeared in 1913 on the occasion of the publication of the first of the annual volumes that are the society’s raison d’être.

Classical Music: Top New Releases – January 2024

Brilliant Classics (January 3, 2024): New classical music from Tchaikovsky, Schubert, Liszt, Adriana, Shostakovich and more…

Arts/Books: Times Literary Supplement – Jan 5, 2024

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Times Literary Supplement (January 3, 2024): The latest issue features ‘The Lady Vanishes’ – Muireann Maguire on a revival of classic crime fiction; What next for Julian Assange; David Hockney’s drawings; Dreaming up 007; The science of belonging and more…

Previews: Country Life Magazine – January 3, 2024

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Country Life Magazine – January 2, 2024: The latest issue features ‘The Very Best Of Britain’; Marylands, a Surrey country house with a Spanish influence; artist Anne Wright’s miniature Daffodils and snowdrops at her small nursery in North Yorkshire; and how January weather can set the tone for the year to come…

The foul-mouthed Miller and the prim Princess

Geoffrey Chaucer created his Canterbury pilgrims more than 600 years ago, yet his band of travellers speaks across the ages, finds Matthew Dennison

Let’s hear it for Britain

Carla Passino bangs the drum for the British Isles with 50 things to make the nation proud, from code-cracking to clever dogs — and everything in between

Snow magic

Mary Keen is mesmerised by the array of rare and highly collectable snowdrops that artist Anne Wright is breeding at her small nursery in North Yorkshire

Keith Halstead’s favourite painting

The chief executive of the Royal Countryside Fund chooses a work that sparks memories of his childhood in rural Norfolk

Thought for the year 2024

Carla Carlisle enters the new year with a determination to remain positive, fortified by the sentiments of W. H. Auden

A fairy house

The glamour and glitz of 1920s stage and screen is rekindled as Clive Aslet puts the spotlight on Marylands, a Surrey country house with a Spanish influence

Baby, it’s cold outside

In the first of a new series on weather lore, Lia Leendertz reveals how January can set the tone for the year to come

Interiors

The bathroom of a Somerset house is restored with a nod to its historic roots, finds Arabella Youens, and Amelia Thorpe shares ideas for creating your own luxury bathing sanctuary

London Life

Start the year with an exhibition, says Charlotte Mullins, while Carla Passino assesses architect Richard Rogers’s contribution to the London skyline and Gilly Hopper looks ahead to the year’s big events in the capital

Kitchen garden cook

Melanie Johnson on sweet and nutty Jerusalem artichokes

Travel

Mary Lussiana stays at a land-mark luxury hotel in Marrakech while Luke Abrahams explores Athens in the snow and James Fisher dons his skis and discovers the Dolomites

New series: Arts & Antiques

Carla Passino investigates the centuries-long British passion for collecting antiquities and finds that all roads lead to Rome

2024 Interview: President Zelensky’s Goals And Why No Comprising With Putin

The Economist (January 2, 2024) - As 2024 begins President Volodymyr Zelensky speaks to The Economist’s Editor-in-chief, Zanny Minton Beddoes, about his political and military goals for the coming year and why he won’t compromise with Vladimir Putin.

Video timeline: 00:00 – 2024 military goals 01:35 – Why he won’t negotiate

Volodymyr Zelensky is angry; not about the successes of his enemies (he sees none) nor even about his own army’s lack of progress on the battlefield. Instead, Ukraine’s president is exasperated by the wobbles of some of his allies as well as the detachment among some of his compatriots. And he wants you to know it.

Hardened by the pressures of war, a year of negative headlines and the failure of a counter-offensive that promised so much at the start of 2023, he has shed the lightness and humour that characterised our earlier meetings with him. Seated in his situation room and speaking to The Economist via Zoom (you can watch the video here), he punches out his message as if trying to break through the computer screen.

A New Year’s interview with Volodymyr Zelensky: https://econ.st/48A4Nim

Modernist Architecture: United Nations Building In New York City (1952)

Architectural Digest (January 1, 2024) – Michael Wyetzner of Michielli + Wyetzner Architects joins AD in New York for an in-depth walking tour of the United Nations.

Founded in 1945, the UN now comprises 193 member states, all of whom assemble at their modernist headquarters on the bank of the East River in NYC. The birthplace of international diplomacy, the United Nations became the first major building in New York to represent International Style architecture.

Arts/History: Smithsonian Magazine – January 2024

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Smithsonian Magazine (January 1, 2024) – The latest issue features ‘Picturing The Past’ – A special report on Tracing A Lost Ancestry; Reimagining Portraits of Civil War Heroes; A Journey to Discover an African Homeland; Pinpointing Birthplaces of the Enslaved, and more…

The Top Ten Ocean Stories of 2023

This year was marked by many broken records in the ocean.

Major discoveries, an undersea tragedy and international cooperation were some of the biggest saltwater moments of the year

By Naomi Greenberg

The New York Times Book Review – December 31, 2023

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THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (December 31, 2023): The latest issue features Francis Ford Coppola Is Ready For His Close-Up – Sam Wasson’s supremely entertaining new book, “The Path to Paradise”, tracks the ups and downs, ins and outs, of a remarkable career.

The Problem of Misinformation in an Era Without Trust

This image shows the face of a wooden Pinocchio figure reflected in the screen of an iPhone on a bright red background. Pinocchio’s long nose protrudes a couple inches from the screen.

Elon Musk thinks a free market of ideas will self-correct. Liberals want to regulate it. Both are missing a deeper predicament.

By Jennifer Szalai

When the billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk sat down for his profanity-laced interview at The New York Times’s DealBook Summit in late November, his petulant dropping of F-bombs received a lot of attention. Less noticed but far more revealing was his evident disdain for a humble word beginning with the letter T. “You could not trust me,” Musk said, affecting an air of tough-guy indifference in his shearling-collared flight jacket and shiny black boots. “It is irrelevant. The rocket track record speaks for itself.”

Previews: Best Books On Foreign Affairs For 2024

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Foreign Policy Magazine (December 31, 2023): The Best of Books 2024 Here are 30 major nonfiction titles coming out this year on Foreign Policy’s radar, from economic manifestos to histories of forgotten eras to new assessments of great-power competition in the 21st century. New titles include:

The Everything War: Amazon’s Ruthless Quest to Own the World and Remake Corporate Power 

The Everything War: Amazon's Ruthless Quest to Own the World and Remake  Corporate Power: 9780316269773: Mattioli, Dana: Books - Amazon.com

by Dana Mattioli (April 23, 2024)

From veteran Amazon reporter for The Wall Street Journal, The Everything War is the first untold, devastating exposé of Amazon’s endless strategic greed, from destroying Main Street to remaking corporate power, in pursuit of total domination, by any means necessary.

In 2017, Lina Khan published a paper that accused Amazon of being a monopoly, having grown so large, and embedded in so many industries, it was akin to a modern-day Standard Oil. Unlike Rockefeller’s empire, however, Bezos’s company had grown voraciously without much scrutiny. 

Foreign Agents: How American Lobbyists and Lawmakers Threaten Democracy Around the World

Foreign Agents

By Casey Michel (August 2024)

A stunning investigation and indictment of the elements in United States’ foreign lobbying industry and the threat they pose to democracy.

For years, one group of Americans has worked as foot-soldiers for the most authoritarian regimes around the planet. In the process, they’ve not only entrenched dictatorships and spread kleptocratic networks, but they’ve secretly guided U.S. policy without the rest of America even being aware. And now, journalist Casey Michel contends some of them have begun turning their sights on American democracy itself.

New Cold Wars : China’s Rise, Russia’s Invasion, and America’s Struggle to Defend the West

New Cold Wars by David E. Sanger: 9780593443590 | PenguinRandomHouse.com:  Books

By David E. Sanger (April 2024)

Three decades after the end of the Cold War, the United States finds itself in a volatile rivalry against the other two great nuclear powers–Xi Jinping’s China and Vladimir Putin’s Russia–in a world far more complex and dangerous than that of a half century ago

.New Cold Wars–the latest from Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and bestselling author of The Perfect Weapon, David E. Sanger–is a fast-paced account of America’s plunge into simultaneous confrontations against two very different adversaries. For years, the United States was confident that the newly-democratic Russia and increasingly wealthy China could be lured into a Western-led order that promised prosperity and relative peace–so long as they agreed to Washington’s terms. By the time America emerged from the age of terrorism, it was clear that this had been a fantasy.