A.S. Byatt

A terrible beauty

De Waal’s The White Road finds the history of porcelain manufacture shrouded in secrecy and littered with terrible disasters, says A.S. Byatt

issue 19 September 2015

Good pottery appears to be cool and silent — something vulnerable that, with luck, can outlast many human generations. A white porcelain dish seems calm and decorous; one knows that skill went into its evenness, into the exact whiteness, into its lightness. But when I began to think about pots I had no idea of the extreme violence, happenstance and risk that are an intrinsic part of the maker’s art.

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