Cross-dressing

The visionary artist Anselm Kiefer has restlessly challenged and redefined recent German history and cultural shibboleths in an extraordinary body of work that spans more than six decades. Two months ago he turned 80, an anniversary marked by the staging of exhibitions from Amsterdam to the Ashmolean and the publication of this impressive study devoted to the notable women that thread their way through his work, endlessly shape-shifting. Women are to be found everywhere in Kieferland: haunting, teasing, beckoning, seducing; imperious, impassive, poetic and unknowable. There are martyrs, queens and heroines of the revolution, Brunhilde and the Valkyries, Madame de Stael and Marie-Antoinette. There are women from the Bible –

At the beginning of her biography of the novelist, ‘fairy sprite’ and proto-feminist Lady Caroline Lamb, Lady Antonia Fraser hints that this may be her final book. Not for her a dramatic, Prospero-breaking-his-staff exit; instead, she writes mildly in the prologue that ‘this book… can also be regarded as the culmination of an exciting and fulfilling life spent studying history’. We must hope that Fraser continues to research and publish. Yet if this is to be her swansong, it is characteristically readable, accomplished and in places positively revolutionary. Glenarvon, Caro’s stinging attack on Byron, became a bestseller, even as it led to her banishment from society Lamb – or Caro