Amalfi Coast
Painting by Edmund Berninger, 1929
(May 2013) We started the day well, with a very fast and comfy train, replete with champagne, from Rome to Naples. But then we were emptied at Naples station where an old gent showed us to a shop, where a young fellow, probably the grandson, sold us tickets on a local caboose to Sorrento. P spent the trip standing at 10 degrees off perpendicular, and L was groped. In Tasso’s town, we caught a hotel jalopy that took us up a 60 degree slope on a nerve-twanging single road to the Art Hotel Gran Paradiso, a chichi, vaguely Bohemian pile…
Continue Reading →Israfel
Daguerreotype copy by Oscar Halling, c. 1860s
(Hervey Allen) (1926) The big Pennsylvanian author of the romantic hit Anthony Adverse (apparently the favourite novel of Tony Curtis) obviously admired the lush and gothic, and his long, detailed, overwritten biography of Poe is great fun in a crusty, hoary, adamantine way. Poe’s life was such as to invite that treatment. His work might best be called ‘patchy’, and his life a tribulation. Harold Bloom, who famously detested Poe’s writing, said “Only outrageous overplaying works with Poe…but [he], as I have glumly acknowledged, is inescapable. To dream everyone’s nightmare has to be genius, which cannot be denied Poe.”* He did…
Continue Reading →The Coldest Winter
(David Halberstam) (2007) Through the noise of Vietnam and Iraq, we fail to hear and heed the still reverberating conflict in Korea, under armistice since 1953 but technically open. David Halberstam, in his last book, brilliantly recounts the manoeuvres and ideologies at play, and beyond the recounting of the bloody and appalling battles, informed by a decade’s worth of interviews of the high and the low, and supplemented by excellent maps, shows the political shadows cast by the conflict on American policy, such as the stance vis-á-vis China, only corrected after a generation of isolationism, and the consignment to irrelevance, for almost a…
Continue Reading →American Visions
Copley could paint a nice lady; couldn't paint a shark
(Robert Hughes) (1997) Hughes was one of those big, bold, Jesuitical, learned men of the arts whom we sorely need and miss. This book, and the series on which it is based, is crammed with Hughes’ invariably wise, precise and yet loving take on American Art. He took up a role as Time’s art critic in 1970 and those who are old enough to have actually read Time recall his brilliant and generally fair opinions on the world of contemporary art. This wonderful review is as good as his seminal The Shock of the New but wiser and less hurried. If you…
Continue Reading →The Adventures of Robin Hood
(Dir. Michael Curtiz, William Keighley) (1938) It might be a wall of corn, but as they say in showbiz, “the colour of corn is Gold”. This is the lushest, most colourful, most joyous blood-and-thunder adventure ever to burst out of Hollywood in the Golden Age, a filmed comic book that puts modern actioners in the shade. It has been written that Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland were very much in unrequited love, and this shines forth in the film. Olivia is pretty as a picture and she glows here, without the treacle-and-vanessa-redgrave emoting she sheds in, say,…
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