Sir Henry Raeburn’s exquisite nineteenth-century portrait of Sir Walter Scott hangs — magisterial, but unfamiliar — in an ordered sea of Scottish portraits, of Scottish subjects, in the renascent Scottish National Portrait Gallery. As the stock picture question of University Challenge well attests, putting a face to a famous name, especially that of a writer
It took ten attempts, nine rejections, one brave publisher, but ultimately only a handful of revisions before the late Sir William Golding finally saw his debut novel, Lord of the Flies, in print in 1954. To mark the centenary of Golding’s birth the Bodleian Library in Oxford recently unveiled the original manuscript. The book’s text,
As Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan opens at the National Gallery, Daisy Dunn looks at his famous Renaissance biographer, Giorgio Vasari. Giorgio Vasari’s book The Lives of the Most Eminent Artists, Sculptors, and Architects, commonly abbreviated to The Lives is not what one might expect of a history, or a biography,
This clip, about a Luddite monk’s discovery of the book, has been circulating YouTube. How do you use it? If you close this ‘book’, will all the text inside be saved, or will it just disappear? Plus ça change… On a separate but related point, there was a particularly well-documented case of a vanishing text in 2009. Following
Oh what a tangled web she weaves! Victoria Hislop’s third novel, the appropriately titled The Thread, is pleasingly complex. The story traces several generations of a fictional Greek family called Komninos against the historical backdrop of the rise and fall of Greece’s second city, Thessaloniki, in the 20th century. To make things even knottier, most
‘They were afraid. Brave men are always afraid. Courage isn’t the absence of fear, it’s the willingness to face fear. They faced their fears.’ The words are familiar. Euripides rehearsed them, Seneca upheld them, Mark Twain perpetuated them. But never have they seemed as relevant as when former SOE [Special Operations Executive] agent Noreen Riols
As part of the Guildford Book Festival, Lynne Truss spoke last Saturday evening to an audience gathered in Watts Gallery – the spectacular space once owned by the Victorian artist G.F. Watts that now houses the largest collection of his works. Truss was discussing her novel, Tennyson’s Gift, which imagines what it could have been
It is Guildford’s turn to pick up the literary baton and kick off its 10-day Book Festival. Here is the first of our dispatches from Surrey. At the summit of the sprawling city of Guildford, with its cobbled streets and quaint hideaways, looms the Cathedral famed for featuring in The Omen. Last night its bells
At face value, Asti Hustvedt’s Medical Muses is rather a niche tome, a faultlessly researched history of three female hysterics living in eighteenth-century Paris. However, it actually provides a broad and fascinating insight into the interwoven development of the arts and sciences during La Belle Époque – an age of rapid technological, medical and artistic
As The Hemlock Cup is released in paperback, Daisy Dunn engages in some Socratic Dialogue with its author, historian and broadcaster Bettany Hughes I get the impression from your book that Socrates must have been quite aware of his own eccentricity, or oddness. Do you think he knew he was doomed from the start? In
It was 70 years ago yesterday that Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt, floating perilously across a sea of U-boats, signed the declaration of wartime aims that came to be known as the Atlantic Charter. The maps preserved at the Churchill War Rooms (CWR), Churchill’s former Westminster bunker, are heavily speckled by pinholes, not least
“I’ve never had boundaries. They’re not interesting. I don’t need anyone to tell me this is art, this is architecture. This is it. Do you like it? Enjoy it? Suffer from it? Does it excite you?” Israeli-born Ron Arad, famous as much for his adjustable Bookworm shelf and Rover Chair (1981) as for his architecturally
Writer Giles Milton talks to Daisy Dunn about the relative who inspired both his family’s artistic passions and the narrative of his most recent book, Wolfram: The Boy who went to War, reviewed in the Spectator last month by Hester Vaizey. You note that the book grew out of many hours of interviews. How long
The resident ravens of the Tower of London seem to croak a little louder these days. A few yards from their gathering spot, a golden eagle, traditional symbol of power and kingship, perches on a military standard, keeping watch. It is one of several exhibits on display at the newly refurbished Fusilier Museum in the
‘Hollywood was different back then.’ For a start, the Awards ceremonies of the ‘60’s weren’t dominated by ‘very small young men who had just been in a vampire film’. Soirees brimmed with the gravitas of Beverley Hills’ most statuesque, those around whom a youthful Michael Caine gawped and assimilated anecdotes until, all of a sudden,