The New Yorker (March 11, 2024): The new issue‘s cover features Peter de Sève’s “Downhill” – The artist depicts carving up the slopes, straight into spring.
Katja Grace’s apartment, in West Berkeley, is in an old machinist’s factory, with pitched roofs and windows at odd angles. It has terra-cotta floors and no central heating, which can create the impression that you’ve stepped out of the California sunshine and into a duskier place, somewhere long ago or far away. Yet there are also some quietly futuristic touches. High-capacity air purifiers thrumming in the corners. Nonperishables stacked in the pantry. A sleek white machine that does lab-quality RNA tests. The sorts of objects that could portend a future of tech-enabled ease, or one of constant vigilance.
The classical-education movement seeks to fundamentally reorient schooling in America. Its emphasis on morality and civics has also primed it for partisan takeover.
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (March ,8 2024): The latest issue featuresRenaissance scholar Ramie Targoff’s new book, “Shakespeare’s Sisters,” which sets out to show modern readers that the Elizabethan era did indeed produce its share of great women writers, and she details four of them across a range of disciplines.
In “Shakespeare’s Sisters,” the Renaissance scholar Ramie Targoff presents an astounding group of Elizabethan women of letters.
By Tina Brown
SHAKESPEARE’S SISTERS: How Women Wrote the Renaissance, by Ramie Targoff
Judith Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf’s imaginary sister of the Bard, was for years the accepted portrait of the nonexistent writer of Renaissance England. In “A Room of One’s Own,” her seminal feminist essay, Woolf concluded that any glimmer of female creativity in Shakespeare’s time would have been expunged by a pinched life as a breeding machine of children who so often died, disallowed opinions of her own. Had any woman survived these conditions, wrote Woolf, “whatever she had written would have been twisted and deformed, issued from a strained and morbid imagination.”
Using clever camera methods, a new photo book illuminates how honeybees see plants and flowers.
By William Atkins
In WHAT THE BEES SEE: The Honeybee and Its Importance to You and Me, Craig P. Burrows’s ultraviolet-lit photographs mimic the fluorescence his botanical subjects emit when exposed to sunlight, revealing colors and textures usually obscured by the dazzle of visible light. Because bees see in the ultraviolet spectrum, Burrows’s method can afford us a glimpse of the world as they perceive it: His portraits of plants are, in part, prompts for interspecies empathy at a time when bees are under attack on multiple fronts, from air pollution to pesticides.
The Week In Art Podcast (March 8, 2024): To coincide with International Women’s Day on 8 March, the South London Gallery is opening the exhibition Acts of Resistance: Photography, Feminisms and the Art of Protest.
Activism and photography have long gone hand in hand but this collaborative exhibition, organised with the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), attempts to capture a new chapter in this distinguished history, with a particular focus on feminism across the world. We talk to Sarah Allen, the head of programme at the South London Gallery, and Fiona Rogers, the V&A’s Parasol Foundation curator of women in photography, about the show. The financier, philanthropist, collector and leader of cultural organisations Jacob Rothschild died last week at the age of 87.
We talk to Anna Somers Cocks, the founder of The Art Newspaper, who interviewed Lord Rothschild on numerous occasions, about his impact on the visual arts and heritage. And this episode’s Work of the Week is Adelphi, made in 1967 by Robert Ryman. It is one of around 50 pieces by Ryman in the exhibition The Act of Looking, which opened this week at the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris. Guillaume Fabius, the co-curator of the show, joins us to discuss the painting.
Acts of Resistance: Photography, Feminisms and the Art of Protest, South London Gallery, London, 8 March-9 June.
Robert Ryman: The Act of Looking, Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris, until 1 July.
Country Life Magazine – March 5, 2024: The latest issue features The Country Life Top 100 – Britain’s leading exponents of country-house architecture, interior design, gardens and specialist services…
Welcome to the eighth edition of our guide to Britain’s leading exponents of country-house architecture, interior design, gardens and specialist services
New series: The legacy
In the first of this new series, Kate Green celebrates Dame Miriam Rothschild’s remarkable contribution to the nation as a pioneer of wildflower gardening
Reach for the Skye
Following in the slipstream of swimming cattle, Joe Gibbs enjoys safe passage to the Isle of Skye courtesy of the world’s last manual turntable ferry
Hail the conquering heroes
Jack Watkins is in the saddle for a canter through 100 years of the Cheltenham National Hunt Festival’s Blue Riband event, the Gold Cup
Arts & antiques
Works by a whole host of great artists are more accessible than you might imagine. Carla Passino talks to leading art dealers about the Old Masters you could collect
Sir Alistair Spalding’s favourite painting
The artistic director admires a religious fresco that encourages contemplation and reflection
Out of Africa
Carla Carlisle reflects on the life of Karen Blixen after visiting the author’s former home in Kenya
Renewal and recovery
The restoration of Boston Manor House in Greater London offers a fascinating insight into changing tastes, reveals Charles O’Brien
The Devil wears parsley
March can be the month of all weathers, warns Lia Leendertz
The masked singer
Jack Watkins goes in search of the elusive, enchanting woodlark
London Life
Cashing in with Russell Higham
Celebrating Claridge’s
Revisiting James Burton’s beat with Carla Passino
Jack Watkins finds change in the air at the Natural History Museum
Stancombe revisited
Marion Mako visits Stancombe Park, Gloucestershire — Waugh’s garden inspiration for Brideshead
Kitchen garden cook
Melanie Johnson harnesses the subtle depth of flavour of leeks
And so to sleep…
Hemlock is a pretty addition to riverbanks, but its charm ends there, says Deborah Nicholls-Lee
The claws are out
Simon Lester shares the thrill of an encounter with the secretive native white-clawed crayfish
The good stuff
Patterned or pastel? Hetty Lintell showcases the finest waistcoats
The New Yorker (March 4, 2024): The new issue‘s cover features Barry Blitt’s “Slappenheimer” – The artist revisits the infamous Oscars slap to riff on the tensions of this year’s ceremony.
Literary Review – March 1, 2024: The latest issue features ‘Gaughin’s Midlife Crisis’; Geology vs Genesis; Japan’s War Trials; Saddam’s Blunderers and Barbara Comyns in Full…
“The Showman: The Inside Story of the Invasion That Shook the World and Made a Leader of Volodymyr Zelensky” By Simon Shuster
As someone who has to consume quite a lot of Russian media, I can tell you that if there is one common denominator, it’s that whether we’re talking about a shouty TV news programme (less Newsnight, more a kind of geopolitical Jeremy Kyle Show), a stodgy government newspaper of record or a racy tabloid, no one has a good word for Volodymyr Zelensky.
There are, I have long suspected, two types of cinephiles: those who think Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) is a masterpiece and those who think it’s a relentless bore. Early in their new biography of the film director, Kubrick: An Odyssey, Robert P Kolker and Nathan Abrams make clear which camp they belong to, describing the scene in which the astronaut Frank Poole jogs around (and around and around and around) the spaceship Discovery as ‘one of the most lyrical passages in film history’.
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (March 1, 2024): The latest issue features ‘Yakety-Yak’ – In “Language City”, Ross Perlin chronicles some of the precious traditions hanging on in New York, the world’s most linguistically diverse metropolis…
The feisty title character of her new book, “Ferris,” has a sharp eye for detail, and so, its author hopes, does she. Meanwhile, she is on an Alice McDermott reading jag.
In “Language City,” the linguist Ross Perlin chronicles some of the precious traditions hanging on in the world’s most linguistically diverse metropolis.
The National Gallery (March 1, 2024): Is there engineering in art, as well as art in engineering? We look at Turner’s famous depiction of a steam train in ‘Rain, Steam and Speed’ and stormy seas in ‘Dutch Boats in a Gale’ (1801).
Rob Bell from the Institution of Mechanical Engineers gives us an engineer’s take on these two paintings at the National Gallery. The Institution of Mechanical Engineers was founded in 1847 and has over 100,000 members around the world.
Sometimes we ignore a book’s material presence: absorbed, ‘good’ reading is often figured as a forgetting of the material conditions of book, body, room and time, even though these conditions affect how we read. With certain other books it makes no sense to separate text from object.
Bibliophobia: The End and the Beginning of the Book by Brian Cummings.
There are seventy million more privately held guns in the US – around four hundred million of them – than there are people. AR-15s comprise about 5 per cent of the total, but it is currently the best-selling rifle in the country.
Boomers Daily 