RSS

Contact us

Friday 5 December 2008

Magnifico

A true Renaissance man

Sarah Bradford reviews Miles J. Unger's life of Lorenzo de' Medici

‘Ouch!’ may be the response to this statement of a melancholy truth, followed by the malicious listing of colleagues and rivals (for all colleagues are also rivals) who owe their success today to just such prejudice, stratagems and servility. Not that there is much comfort in this.

Survival — setting aside the accidents of time which have seen the greater part of the work of ancient authors like Callimachus lost — depends doubtless on merit. Those authors whose works are remembered and read are the few who do not deserve to be forgotten. But how many, even among those who are remembered, are still read, and, of those who are, how much of their output? What of Johnson himself? Belloc thought that you should read Rasselas once a year because there is so much well-expressed wisdom there, but how few of us are likely to do so — how few may have read it even once.

You remember the books you read and enjoyed and learned from when you were young, and you wonder who reads them now. Maybe nobody does. Maybe they linger only in the memory of a ‘Happy Few’, the number diminishing every year. Maybe it would be a mistake to read some of them again: Nigel Dennis’s Cards of Identity, for instance. It was exhilarating to read it at 18. Now, apart from the memory of the enjoyment I got from it, I recall only one line: ‘All trees are oaks to Presidents’. Or perhaps to headmasters and housemasters, I thought then. Ten or so years later, there was a brilliant little novel, a tale of corruption, called Ask Agamemnon. The author’s name was, I think, Hall. Did she? — yes, surely she — write anything else? Other more famous novelists — Snow, Angus Wilson, Elizabeth Bowen, Joyce Cary, William Sansom, L. P. Hartley, William Cooper — seem to exist now only in a sort of shadowland; but all in their different ways once gave me pleasure, mattered to me.

Print this article  |  Email to a friend  |  Permalink  |   Comment   |  Apollo Art Books

Post this entry to:   del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit

Advertisement

Spectator Business | Apollo Magazine

Corporate | Advertising | Privacy | Terms

Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London, SW1H 9HP

All Articles and Content Copyright ©2008 by The Spectator | All Rights Reserved