Mary Robison on the Art of Fiction: “The first thing they’d say was ‘This is a nice story—where’s your novel?’ And I would just lie my head off. ‘Oh, it’s at home. It’s almost there!’”
Elaine Scarry on the Art of Nonfiction: “A lot of my troubles in life have come from taking literally what I should have understood as figurative.”
Prose by Peter Cornell, Rodolfo Enrique Fogwill, Renee Gladman, Nancy Lemann, Banu Mushtaq, K Patrick, and Anne Serre.
Jhumpa Lahiri on the Art of Fiction: “My question is, What makes a language yours, or mine?”
Alice Notley on the Art of Poetry: “Writing is not therapy. That’s the last thing it is. I still have my grief.”
Prose by Elijah Bailey, Julien Columeau, Joanna Kavenna, Samanta Schweblin, Eliot Weinberger, and Joy Williams.
Poetry by Gbenga Adesina, Elisa Gabbert, Jessica Laser, Maureen N. McLane, Mary Ruefle, Julian Talamantez Brolaski, and Matthew Zapruder.
Country Life Magazine (June 18, 2024): The latest issue features ‘Why we adore Venus’, Move over Buckingham Palace – Our grandest houses, Jeremy Clarkson’s favorite painting and Old Masters – Chippendale and Coward revisited…
Jeremy Clarkson’s favourite painting
The television presenter and farmer immerses himself in the age of steam by selecting a 19th-century masterpiece that really stokes the imagination
Venus was her name
Michael Hall lays bare the story of the art world’s enduring love affair with the alluring goddess Venus, from the 4th century BC right up to the modern era
Tripping the light fantastic
Iridescence is one of the natural world’s greatest special effects. Laura Parker showcases the shimmering, jewel-like hues that can take your breath away
The good stuff
It’s the final straw for Hetty Lintell as she picks perfect summer accessories crafted from raffia
Interiors
Giles Kime is whisked through a Sicilian palazzo, a Gothic castle and a Baroque bedroom thanks to the wonders of WOW!house
‘Makes Buckingham Palace seem rather dull’
The London homes of the British aristocracy were often grander than their country counterparts and perfect for entertaining, says Lucien de Guise
Native herbs
Mugwort is connected with child-birth as ‘the mother of herbs’, but John Wright prefers to focus on its many uses in the kitchen
Having the last laugh
Why are beaming faces such a rarity in our portrait galleries? Claudia Pritchard seeks out the grins among the grimaces
‘The oldest Old Thing in England’
Puck has been causing mayhem and misery for a millennium and more. Ian Morton traces the story of the mischievous sprite
Bend it like Beckham
Scotland’s only furniture school is keeping alive the old crafts of upholstery and marquetry, doing justice to its Chippendale name, as Mary Miers discovers
Coward on a mission
Michael Billington finds a depth of emotion behind the laughs in a rare revival of Noël Coward’s last work — a welcome antidote to mind-boggling technology
Opening the shutters
In the second of two articles, John Goodall applauds the remarkable revival of Wolterton Hall in Norfolk as a modern home equipped for the 21st century
The legacy
Victoria Marston hails Douglas Bunn, whose desire to test top British riders to the max led to the drama of the Hickstead Derby
Bourne to run
Kathryn Bradley-Hole finds no end of reasons to stop and stare as she explores the dramatic garden created from a flat water-side site at Emmetts Mill, Surrey
Kitchen garden cook
Melanie Johnson conjures up a trio of dishes to demonstrate the versatility of the courgette
The New Yorker (June 17, 2024): The new issue‘s cover featuresAdrian Tomine’s “Eternal Youth” – For parents trying to look hip, no effort goes unpunished.
Nanotechnology can already puncture cancer cells and drug-resistant bacteria. What will it do next?
By Dhruv Khullar
After the European Elections, President Macron Makes a Gamble
The rise of the far right in Europe might help Americans deprovincialize their own crisis. The single wave has struck many coastlines.
By Adam Gopnik
Deaccessioning the Delights of Robert Gottlieb
The eminent editor’s wife and daughter sift through a lifetime’s worth of collectibles: quirky plastic purses, a porcelain Miss Piggy, and many, many books.
London Review of Books (LRB) – June 14 , 2024: The latest issue features Good Riddance to the Torries; Adam Shatz on ‘Israel’s Descent’; Patricia Lockwood – My Dame Antonia; William Davies – Generation Anxiety…
The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness by Jonathan Haidt. Allen Lane, 385 pp., £25, March, 978 0 241 64766 0
In the 1980s the term ‘anxiety’ was almost eliminated from the lexicon of American psychiatry. The infamous DSM-III (the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) took an axe to various legacies of psychoanalysis that had dominated psychiatric thinking in the postwar decades. Among them was a preoccupation with anxiety. Anything and everything could, it seemed, be attributed to anxiety: whether it presented as a specific phobia or a panic attack, a somatic symptom or just a lurking sense of dread, anxiety was at the root. It was this sort of all-purpose explanation, with no apparent scientific rigour or falsifiability, that the authors of DSM-III were trying to root out.
When Ariel Sharon withdrew more than eight thousand Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip in 2005, his principal aim was to consolidate Israel’s colonisation of the West Bank, where the settler population immediately began to increase. But ‘disengagement’ had another purpose: to enable Israel’s air force to bomb Gaza at will, something they could not do when Israeli settlers lived there.
The State of Israel v. the Jews by Sylvain Cypel, translated by William Rodarmor. Other Press, 352 pp., £24, October 2022, 978 1 63542 097 5
The Palestinians of the West Bank have been, it seems, gruesomely lucky. They are encircled by settlers determined to steal their lands – and not at all hesitant about inflicting violence in the process – but the Jewish presence in their territory has spared them the mass bombardment and devastation to which Israel subjects the people of Gaza every few years.
Deux peuples pour un état?: Relire l’histoire du sionisme by Shlomo Sand. Seuil, 256 pp., £20, January, 978 2 02 154166 3
Our Palestine Question: Israel and American Jewish Dissent, 1948-78 by Geoffrey Levin. Yale, 304 pp., £25, February, 978 0 300 26785 3
Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life by Joshua Leifer. Dutton, 398 pp., £28.99, August, 978 0 593 18718 0
The Necessity of Exile: Essays from a Distance by Shaul Magid. Ayin, 309 pp., £16.99, December 2023, 979 8 9867803 1 3
Deluge: Gaza and Israel from Crisis to Cataclysm edited by Jamie Stern-Weiner. OR Books, 336 pp., £17.99, Ap
The Week In Art Podcast (June 14, 2024): This week: it’s arguably the best loved of the major art fairs among collectors and dealers, but what have we learned about the art market at this year’s Art Basel, in its original Swiss home?
The Art Newspaper’s acting art market editor, Tim Schneider, tells us about the big sales in Switzerland amid the wider market picture. The journalist Lynn Barber has a new book out, called A Little Art Education, in which she reflects on her encounters with artists from Salvador Dalí to Tracey Emin. We talk to her about the highs and lows of several decades of artist interviews.
And this episode’s Work of the Week is Woman Leaning on a Portfolio (1799) by Guillaume Lethière. Lethiére was born in Guadeloupe in the Caribbean to a plantation-owner father and an enslaved mother, but eventually became one of the most notable painters of his period in France and beyond. We talk to Esther Bell and Olivier Meslay, the curators of a major survey of Lethière’s work opening this week at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, US, and travelling later in the year to the Louvre in Paris.
Art Basel, Basel, Switzerland, until Sunday, 16 June.
A Little Art Education by Lynn Barber, Cheerio, £15 (hb).
The New Yorker (June 10, 2024): The new issue‘s cover features Victoria Tentler-Krylov’s “Pawns in the Park” – The artist captures a corner of calm contemplation in the midst of New York’s hustle and bustle.
The truly disquieting thought was that the cult of personality around the Prime Minister had become suffocating and seemingly impossible to pierce—until now. By Isaac Chotiner
After Governor Kathy Hochul’s flip-flop on congestion pricing, a cop reconsiders his retirement while inching his Lexus through snarled-up traffic on the F.D.R.
The Week In Art Podcast (June 7, 2024): This week: we explore the Art Institute of Chicago’s exhibition dedicated to what Georgia O’Keeffe called her New Yorks—paintings of skyscrapers and views from one of them across the East River, which marked a turning point in her career.
Sarah Kelly Oehler, one of the curators of the show, tells us more. One of the most distinctive of all London’s contemporary art spaces, Studio Voltaire, is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year, and has begun a fundraising drive to consolidate its future, with a gala dinner this week and a Christie’s auction later this month. We talk to the chair of Studio Voltaire’s trustees and a non-executive director of Frieze, Victoria Siddall, about the anniversary and the precarious funding landscape, even for the UK’s most dynamic non-profits.
And this episode’s Work of the Week is an untitled painting from the Austrian painter Martha Jungwirth’s 2022 series Francisco de Goya, Still Life with Ribs and Lamb’s Head. Based on a work by the Spanish master in the Louvre in Paris, Jungwirth’s painting features in a new survey of her work that has just opened at the Guggenheim Bilbao in Spain. We speak to its curator, Lekha Hileman Waitoller.
Georgia O’Keeffe: My New Yorks, Art Institute of Chicago, until 22 September; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, from 25 October-16 February 2025.
The date of XXX, as the sale of works to benefit Studio Voltaire at Christie’s is called, is yet to be confirmed. Check the organisations’ websites for updates; Beryl Cook/Tom of Finland, Studio Voltaire, London, until 25 August.
Martha Jungwirth, Guggenheim Bilbao, until 22 September.
THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR(June 4, 2024): The latest issue features ‘An Olympian for the Ages’ – Why George Eyser’s feats at the 1904 Games deserve to be celebrated today; Joshua Prager on a forgotten Olympian, Mickalene Thomas and the art of remixing, new poetry from Ange Mlinko, and more…
Is the convergence of human and machine really upon us?
The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI by Ray Kurzweil
In the fall of 2014, an MIT cognitive scientist named Tomaso Poggio predicted that humankind was at least 20 years away from building computers that could interpret images on their own. Doing so, declared Poggio, “would be one of the most intellectually challenging things … for a machine to do.” One month later, Google released an AI program that did exactly what he’d deemed impossible.
Country Life Magazine (June 4, 2024): The latest issue features Britain’s Wildlife Safaris; Tulips, tanks and teddies – The great passions….
Stuff and nonsense
Collectors explain their peculiar passions, from tanks to taxidermy, tulips to teddy bears, to Kate Green, Agnes Stamp, Tiffany Daneff and Octavia Pollock
A walk on the wild side
Ben Lerwill embarks on a great British safari, seeking out the best places to witness the full colour of Nature, from red deer to golden eagles and brown argus butterflies to grey seals
Standing on ceremony
The spectacle of The King’s Birthday Parade will summon up a vision from a bygone age, suggests Simon Doughty, as he chronicles the evolution of the ceremonial uniform
Beccy Speight’s favourite painting
The CEO of the RSPB chooses a dramatic and evocative work
Crossing the channel
Carla Carlisle reflects on the 80th anniversary of D-Day and wonders ‘what comes next?’
A Georgian vision
John Martin Robinson visits Gatewick in West Sussex and finds a modern country house harbouring an 18th-century spirit
The legacy
Kate Green hails F. M. Halford’s contribution to dry-fly fishing
The longest day and the shortest night
Harvest hopes and the magic of midsummer, with Lia Leendertz
Her green and pleasant land
Mary Miers paints a picture of Peggy Guggenheim’s rural idyll
Fresh as a summer breeze
Natasha Goodfellow picks out botanicals to add complexity and character to both food and drink
Interiors
A lambing shed turned home office wows Arabella Youens
London Life
Russell Higham on London Zoo memories)
Garden squares and gasholders
Gilly Hopper tucks into canal-side dining
Nick Foulkes indulges in The Emory experience
Floreat Etona
Education and horticulture still go hand in hand at Eton in Berkshire, as George Plumptre discovers
Kitchen garden cook
Savour tart gooseberries this summer, says Melanie Johnson
Native herbs
John Wright extols the virtues of the underused wild marjoram
The good stuff
Hetty Lintell’s deck-shoe shuffle
Travel
Emma Love sets sail on luxury yachts
Lauren Ho puts her best foot forward in Zambia
Pamela Goodman aces it
A little to the left
Being left-handed is no barrier to greatness, finds Bernard Bale
News, Views and Reviews For The Intellectually Curious
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