Literary Review – July 2023 Issue: Brushes with the Dutch Golden Age; @LauraCummingArt’s ‘Thunderclap’ – a remarkable experiment in form as well as a richly satisfying extended meditation on art, life and death’; Bismarck’s Great Gamble; Eden by Thames – The Infinite City: Utopian Dreams on the Streets of London…

Conspiracy Theory of Everything

The Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World By James Ball

Back in the mists of time, great idealism surrounded social media. There was a sense that global interconnection would shift us into a more egalitarian and democratic age. How time makes fools of us all. 

Blast from the Past

Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art & Life & Sudden Death By Laura Cumming

As a teenager with an interest in art, growing up on London’s Old Kent Road with a father whose mantra was ‘God gave you legs to walk’ (he didn’t believe in God but he did believe in walking), I often found myself on Sunday afternoons walking to the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square. I remember distinctly the day I discovered the Dutch painters. It wasn’t Rembrandt or Vermeer who caught my eye, but Hendrick Avercamp and, especially, Pieter de Hooch.