Category Archive: WRITING & LITERATURE
Nikolaus Pevsner – The Life
(by Susie Harries) The rather ponderous biographical figure can make for a fascinating biography, when it is written and researched judiciously and with love. Pevsner’s love for his adopted England is shown in the Teutonic thoroughness with which he trundled about every shire in the country, travelling and lodging uncomfortably with a hard cheese sandwich wedged in his coat pocket, to document every church, every manor, every public building, bridge and stile of consequence. He accumulated a wall of architectural volumes for the intelligent layperson that still inspire the question: “Is it in Pevsner?”
Continue Reading →The Moon and Sixpence
(by W. Somerset Maugham) W struggled to create a genuine primitive but he comes close with Charles Strickland, a nasty and tormented artist, based on Paul Gauguin (born 7 June 1848, died 8 May 1903 in Polynesia). Strickland’s exchanges with the Maugham-like narrator are great fun. “Don’t you care whether you paint well or badly?” “I don’t. I want only to paint what I see.”
Continue Reading →Middlemarch
(by George Eliot) Honestly, you just want to smash Dorothea Brookes’ face in.
Continue Reading →Michelangelo: His Epic Life
(by Martin Gayford) Straightfoward but intelligent and informed biography of the world’s greatest visual artist, well sourced and well imagined. Even when he ran out of puff, money or interest, he still managed to do great things; e.g. his incomplete (although officially deemed finished after 45 years of tinkering) tomb of Julius II, with its magnificent centrepiece of Moses. Ridiculously prolific even though he could be a right sod in negotiating and delivering his famous services, as multi-talented as his rival Leonardo, as contradictory as all men, Michelangelo is still “the one to beat”. “And who is He that sculptured…
Continue Reading →The Merry-go-Round in the Sea
(by Randolph Stow) The great Australian family-at-war yarn. The scene of Rick and Jane on the beach is the literary high watermark of dates gone wrong.
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