LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS (March 11, 2025): The latest issue features Mussolini to Meloni; A trip to Mar-a-Lago; The Brothers Grimm and Europe’s Holy Alliance…
Tuberculosis is the world’s most deadly infectious disease, killing more than a million people a year and infecting many millions more, even though treatment in the form of antibiotics has existed for seventy years.
On Sunday, 9 March, at Southbank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall, the City of London Sinfonia and the London Review of Books will be collaborating on an evening of music and readings inspired by Edward Said’s last, posthumous book, On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain.
Revisiting W. H. Auden’s postwar poetry collection The Shield of AchillesBy John Fuller
Awakening
The inner life of Oliver Sacks, as revealed by his letters By Andrew Scull
This week’s @TheTLS, featuring Andrew Scull on Oliver Sacks; John Fuller on Auden’s Shield of Achilles; Krishan Kumar on nationalism; @sophieolive on Dora Carrington; Paul Quinn on Jonathan Meades; @irinibus on Saint Leoba – and much more pic.twitter.com/UHUNWR5JAz
As two paintings by Caravaggio return to public view, it is possible to hope that his best-known lost work will reappear after almost half a century.
Caravaggio: The Ecce Homo Unveiled – an exhibition at the Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, May 28, 2024–February 23, 2025
Caravaggio: The Portrait Unveiled – an exhibition at the Gallerie Nazionali di Arte Antica, Palazzo Barberini, Rome, November 23, 2024–February 23, 2025
Caravaggio, la Natività di Palermo: Nascita e scomparsa di un capolavoro [Caravaggio, the Palermo Nativity: Birth and Disappearance of a Masterpiece] by Michele Cuppone
The terrible fires in January were another reminder that urban planning in Los Angeles has long failed to protect the city from the natural disasters that repeatedly threaten the region.
Kate Green celebrates the Revd Gilbert White, the original ecologist whose 1789 book on flora and fauna has never been out of print
Mad as a box of frogs
Our amphibious friends were once thought to possess mystical powers and they now aid the advance of medicine, as Ian Morton discovers
The ghost of golden daffodils
David Jones traces the fall and rise of the Tenby daffodil — all but extinct in the wild, but making a return as a cultivated bloom
The lure of Venice
Matthew Dennison investigates Britain’s long-standing love affair with the Italian maritime republic, fuelled by Canaletto’s enchanting, kaleidoscopic vedute
Playing the fool
Who could have foreseen the influence of tarot cards down the ages? Deborah Nicholls-Lee delves into decks and divination
Dr Ximena Fuentes Torrijo’s favourite painting
The Ambassador of Chile picks a vast, dreamlike Surrealist work that portrays a turbulent world.
A sense of delight
John Goodall marvels at the outstanding array of new and restored buildings on the grand Aldourie estate in Inverness-shire
Snakes and snails and puppy-dog tales
Matthew Dennison pays tribute to Peter and Iona Opie, who pre-served much-loved folklore and fairy tales for future generations
The good stuff
Work out in style with Hetty Lintell’s elegant exercise picks
Interiors
Amelia Thorpe shares the best of London Design Week wares, plus an elegant room with a view
Shaping the view
Tiffany Daneff admires the vista of rural Northamptonshire from the delightful Modernist garden created for a converted cart house
Foraging
Listen in as John Wright shares his thoughts on wood ears, the fungus with a gelatinous texture
Arts & antiques
Thomas Girtin’s exquisite landscapes were a match for Turner before the artist was cut down in his prime, reveals Carla Passino
History triumphs over invention
A brilliantly acted historical play conquers overproduced Greek mythology for Michael Billington
Marion Milner believed in the importance of creative fulfilment (the ‘genius’ inside every one of us) and offered a kind of manual for finding it. From her earliest self-experiments through decades of psychoanalytic practice she took seriously the need to feel ‘real in living’, and tried to theorise the therapeutic potential of aesthetic experience, however minimal.
William had spent most of his life in the care of the state. His story was one of intergenerational trauma, common to many families in the West of Scotland, and of the lies Scotland tells itself about its treatment of its most vulnerable young people.
Angela Merkel’s low-key, unflappable persona makes it easy to overlook how extraordinary her story is. A life composed of such unlike elements has never been possible before and will never be so again, at least in Europe.
While few would question Messiaen’s importance in 20th-century music, his religious modernism has always been met with accusations of idolatry, inauthenticity and bad taste.
TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT (February 13, 2025): The latest issue features ‘Real Ruins?’ = Mary Beard on what gets left behind; AI’s literary triumph; A Nobel laureate’s prose falls short; The price of woke and Kissinger’s boys…
The Peronist Pope
The Argentine pontiff who accepts his own fallibility By A. N. Wilson
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