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Arts & Literature, Culture, Homes, Magazines, Previews, Reviews

Previews: Country Life Magazine – April 3, 2024

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Country Life Magazine – April 3, 2024: The latest issue features:

Spring fever

The reawakening of Nature has inspired artists from Botticelli to David Hockney and beyond. Michael Prodger revels in the artistic beauty of the season

Prepare to be a-maze-d

Few can match the twists and turns of Adrian Fisher’s stellar career. Deborah Nicholls-Lee meets the maze designer behind the chilling climax of Saltburn

London Life

  • Tianna Williams visits a Scottish corner of the capital
  • Need to Know has all the latest happenings
  • William Sitwell welcomes back the big business lunch
  • Richard MacKichan joins the Noisenights crowd

The icing on Nature’s cake

Poet Laureate Simon Armitage celebrates an annual explosion of pink and white blossom with excerpts from his new book

The legacy

Kate Green on how Sir Joseph Banks sowed the seeds of Kew

Leading by example

In the second of two articles, John Goodall puts the spotlight on the superb school buildings of Lancing College, West Sussex

Little April showers

Discover why a thunderous start to the month suggests a good harvest as Lia Leendertz delves into the weather lore of spring

Interiors

Green is the natural choice for a kitchen, as Amelia Thorpe and Arabella Youens discover

A garden from scratch

Caroline Donald marvels at the rapid transformation of the charming seven-acre garden at Charlton Farm in Wiltshire

Kitchen garden cook

Melanie Johnson puts British asparagus — a verdant harbinger of spring — back on the menu

Travel

  • Camilla Hewitt raises a glass to Cognac
  • Richard MacKichan explores the Alps in summer
  • Hetty Lintell falls in love with Mallorca
  • Pamela Goodman is in awe of the Alhambra

Gen Sir James Everard’s favourite painting

The president of the Army Bene-volent Fund chooses a wonderful depiction of the Battle of Waterloo

Déjà vu all over again

Carla Carlisle attempts to sort the tragedy from the farce in the baffling world of modern politics

Get the London look

Matthew Dennison charts the rise and fall of fashion label Biba

The good stuff

Mesmerising opals are having a moment — Hetty Lintell dives in

The Arts

150 years of the Impressionists

Arts & Literature, Books, Magazines, Previews, Reviews

Books: Literary Review Magazine – April 2024

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Literary Review – April 2, 2024: The latest issue features ‘From Bebop to Britpop’; Legends of Orkney; A Garden of One’s Own and Writing Doomsday…

Storm’s Edge: Life, Death and Magic in the Islands of Orkney By Peter Marshall

By JOHN KEAY 

England: Seven Myths That Changed a Country and How to Set Them Straight By Tom Baldwin & Marc Stears

By RICHARD VINEN 

Four Shots in the Night: A True Story of Espionage, Murder and Justice in Northern Ireland By Henry Hemming

By MALACHI O’DOHERTY 

Stakeknife’s Dirty War: The Inside Story of Scappaticci, the IRA’s Nutting Squad and the British Spooks Who Ran the War By Richard O’Rawe

Arts & Literature, Culture, Magazines, Opinion, Politics, Reviews

Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – April 8, 2024

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A person's silhouette walks up stairs toward a busy city street.

The New Yorker (April 1, 2024): The new issue‘s cover features Pascal Campion’s “Into the Light” – The artist depicts stepping out of the subway into the overwhelming glow of the city.

So You Think You’ve Been Gaslit

An anthropomorphic lantern being lit by a man.

What happens when a niche clinical concept becomes a ubiquitous cultural diagnosis.

By Leslie Jamison

When Leah started dating her first serious boyfriend, as a nineteen-year-old sophomore at Ohio State, she had very little sense that sex was supposed to feel good. (Leah is not her real name.) In the small town in central Ohio where she grew up, sex ed was basically like the version she remembered from the movie “Mean Girls”: “Don’t have sex, because you will get pregnant and die.”

Black Holes Are Even Weirder Than You Imagined

An artistic rendering of two supermassive black holes.

It’s now thought that they could illuminate fundamental questions in physics, settle questions about Einstein’s theories, and even help explain the universe.

By Rivka Galchen

Black holes are, of course, awesome. But, for scientists, they are more awesome. If a rainbow is marvellous, then understanding how all the colors of the rainbow are present, unified, in ordinary white light—that’s more marvellous. (Though, famously, in his poem “Lamia,” John Keats disagreed, blaming “cold philosophy” for unweaving the rainbow.) In recent years, the amount of data that scientists have discovered about black holes has grown exponentially. In January, astronomers announced that the James Webb Space Telescope had observed the oldest black hole yet—one present when the universe was a mere four hundred million years old. (It’s estimated that it’s now 13.8 billion years old.) Recently, two supermassive black holes, with a combined mass of twenty-eight billion suns, were measured and shown to have been rotating tightly around each other, but not colliding, for the past three billion years. And those are just the examples that are easiest for the public to make some sense of. To me, a supermassive black hole sounds sublime; to a scientist, it can also be a test of wild hypotheses. “Astrophysics is an exercise in incredible experiments not runnable on Earth,” Avery Broderick, a theoretical physicist at the University of Waterloo and at the Perimeter Institute, told me. “And black holes are an ideal laboratory.”

Art, Arts & Literature, Collections, History, Reviews, Videos

Collections: A Tour Of Dynastic Chinese Art

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Sotheby’s (March 28, 2024): Reverence for the past is a foundational thread. More than an homage, our instinct to look into the past is a dynamic creative force that shapes our present.

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.

Arts & Literature, Books, Magazines, Previews, Reviews

London Review Of Books – April 4, 2024 Preview

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London Review of Books (LRB) – March 27, 2024: The latest issue features Brandon Taylor – Two Years With Zola,,,

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?

Arts & Literature, Culture, Homes, Magazines, Previews, Reviews

Previews: Country Life Magazine – March 27, 2024

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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

Art, Arts & Literature, Exhibitions, Magazines, Museums, Reviews

International Art: Apollo Magazine – April 2024

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Archives: Issues | Apollo Magazine

Apollo Magazine (March 26, 2024): The new April 2024 issue features ‘Why Everyone Loves Keith Haring’; Who’s afraid of immersive art?; Counting the cost of the Venice Biennale…

April 2024 | Apollo Magazine
April 2024 | Apollo Magazine
Arts & Literature, Culture, Magazines, Opinion, Politics, Reviews

Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – April 1, 2024

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A dog looks out a window.

The New Yorker (March 25, 2024): The new issue‘s cover features Mark Ulriksen’s “Standing Guard” – The artist depicts the tail-wagging occasion of the first signs of spring.

Bryan Stevenson Reclaims the Monument, in the Heart of the Deep South

“The Caring Hand” by Eva Oertli and Beat Huber.
“The Caring Hand,” by Eva Oertli and Beat Huber, is one of more than fifty sculptures at the new Freedom Monument Sculpture Park.Photographs by Kris Graves for The New Yorker

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.

By Doreen St. Félix

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

The Thâtre LÎle Ô in Lyon seen across the 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.

Arts & Literature, Books, Newspapers, Previews, Reviews

The New York Times Book Review – March 24, 2024

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THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (March 23, 2024): 

In Téa Obreht’s Latest, a Refugee Seeks Home in a Ruined World

An illustrated cross section of a house, showing rooms full of animals, trees, water plants and people.

“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.

The serpia-toned photograph portrays a woman in a dark taffeta dress wth a bustle. Her hat is adorned with a dark plume.

By Megan O’Grady

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

The Tiger's Wife: A Novel See more

By Michiko Kakutani

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 & Literature, Culture, History, Magazines, Previews, Reviews

Arts/Culture: Humanities Magazine – Spring 2024

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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

Nick Ripatrazone

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

David Macaulay

“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.