On 12 November 1759 London’s leading artists assembled at the Turk’s Head pub on Gerrard Street and decided to put on the first ever exhibition of contemporary art in Britain. They became the Society of Artists, and Matthew Hargreaves is the first scholar to tell their story. The Society tends to be written up as
Karen Armstrong likes to take on large subjects, and they don’t come much larger than this. Her latest book is nothing less than an attempt to describe the historical origins of all the great world religions. The nearest analogy is The Key to All Mythologies, the grandiloquently named tome which George Eliot’s Mr Casaubon never
A book with the words ‘mavericks’ and ‘Hollywood’ in the subtitle should be a lot more exciting than this. After all, the movie business has been traditionally populated by monstrous egos with access to huge funds — a recipe for drama if ever there were one. Memoirs such as Bob Evans’s The Kid Stays in
A French journalist writing in 1999 was succinct: ‘The English hate the French. Who reciprocate … A purée of prejudice on a bed of inherited loathing. The French consider the English to be arrogant islanders, eating boiled lamb with mint, and not knowing how to be seductive. The English consider us talkative, arrogant, dirty, smelling
Christine Brooke-Rose is not an easy read. She is a sublime roller- coaster: hold on and hurtle with her — the ride will be exhilarating. She is dark, despairing, but her bleakness is Beckettian, the laughs never far away. Now 83, she lives in France, near Avignon. Born in Geneva (British father), she has written
