Daisy Dunn

The true romantic

Schmaltz just doesn’t sit well with traditional English sensibilities. We spend hundreds of millions of pounds on Valentine’s Day each year whilst acknowledging that it’s a load of commercial tosh. There’s little point in wrapping love in a lace doily when at heart it’s a frill-free experience. Lovely as Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s How do I

The Duchess of Cambridge, defining a portrait

Poor Kate Middleton. In the royal tradition of artistic and literary representation, what defines her at this moment in time? The creepy feature on her wardrobe statistics in February’s Vogue? Or Paul Emsley’s even creepier official portrait revealed last week? Emsley’s Vaseline lens ‘Gaussian girl’ take on the future consort would have been appropriate had

Crime and Guilt, by Ferdinand Von Schirach

Tis the season for shopping mall scuffles. A man with a red face prized the last Magimix (steel, 600 rotations per minute) from my hands yesterday, citing ‘the stress of January sales’. I got an apology, but not the blender. What is it that makes us so quick to flip? In a far bleaker arena,

Renaissance superwoman

In 1471 Galeazzo Maria Sforza, Duke of Milan, led a brash entourage of wine-swilling, jewel-bedecked courtiers into Florence. It was Lent. This was not the most auspicious way to begin a diplomatic mission to settle the dispute over Imola, the tiny Romagna fiefdom that Galeazzo had offered to sell to Lorenzo de’Medici. Even Lorenzo, epitome

Review: The Collini Case, by Ferdinand von Schirach

During the Second World War both Germans and Allies routinely shot civilians in reprisal for attacks on their armed forces. One shudders to think that a ratio could even be set at which such killings could be considered legitimate. In 1941 Hitler set the bar at 100 civilians per soldier. How high is too high?

Plein-air pleasures and the great indoors

Some say it’s the walk there that does it. The promenade down a rambling city path and through a crowd of coffee-swigging commuters that fuels the inspiration that can only be spat out when one is positioned at a desk before a blank library wall. In the fourteenth century in Italy the poet Petrarch rekindled

What makes a man

The Roman orator Quintilian offered some practical advice to the budding politician: don’t move too languidly, flick your fingers, or tilt your neck in a feminine way if you want to master the art of rhetoric. Doing all or any of these things could make you seem unmanly. You might have been born a man,

Outliving Ozymandias

In 1842, a wealthy heiress called Sarah Losh built a church in Wreay (rhymes with ‘near’, apparently), close to Carlisle. Coupling carvings of caterpillars with turtle gargoyles and a spattering of pinecones, she was, stylistically, half a century before her time. As a female architect and builder, she was still more precocious. The Pinecone by

Unmastered: A book on desire, most difficult to tell (…or read)

Among the new words which entered the English Dictionary last year was ‘overshare’, def: ‘to reveal an inappropriate amount of detail about one’s personal life’. If that detail pertains to common experience, though, is it inappropriate to share it, or just unnecessary? Unmastered, I think, will divide on that question. It will divide readers, in

‘Story of O’ and the Oral Tradition

A fascinating case was recently brought before the Italian courts. After six years of conjugal submission to her padrone (far better than master, give it that) a woman has filed for divorce with accusations of abuse. The slight snag is that prior to marriage she signed a contract with her lover agreeing to offer herself

Robert Hughes – The novelty of the shock

The real shock of the new came in 1991. It was sobering, and it was reverent, which aren’t exactly the first words one would associate with The Shock of the New art critic Robert Hughes. No wonder it went largely unacknowledged when he passed away last month. While Hughes’ seminal art history series continues to

The language of patronage

Somehow, sex is less appealing when it’s characterised as ‘equitable return’. Though I’ve heard the phrase used in a similar context a dozen times since, I wasn’t quite sure what it meant when I first encountered it three years ago. I’d been drafted in to persuade a wealthy businessman at an art auction that taxidermy

China’s labours

This review will not be kind. But let’s not start that way. Ground lies between. Rewind. Am I the only person to find being addressed like this intensely irritating? China Mieville’s new book Railsea is full of it. Some books are so wrought with references, intertext, allusion that can only manifest itself through repeated syntactical

The arts of voyeurism

Metamorphosis, a temporary exhibition at the National Gallery, London, showcases a range of contemporary artistic responses to Renaissance painter Titian’s Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto metamorphosis paintings, inspired by Ovid. Daisy Dunn looks at the new poetry inspired by the collaboration.   When the hapless youth Actaeon peeled back a curtain dangling in

Raphael’s paintbrush

One of the puns that circulated the cultured elite of Italy during the Renaissance compared the potency of an artist’s paintbrush, his pennello, with his penis, il pene. Raphael, who by all accounts liked his women, perhaps embodied that duality best of all. The artist’s fascination with female kind, Antonio Forcellino suggests in his brilliant

A knight’s tale

I can’t help thinking that the literary editor is having a little chuckle to himself, in his own private way, as he hands me Walking Home: Travels with a Troubadour on the Pennine Way to review. What he knows is that, for my sins, I have never been anywhere near the Pennine Way, the long

An afternoon in Madrid

The most obvious — but far from the only — author to read when in Madrid must be Ernest Hemingway. For a man so fond of the laconic line, his rambling, enduring presence in the city is at once ironic and misplaced. It’s not only the guidebooks which are directing me to his erstwhile favourite

The pain in Spain | 15 June 2012

Something’s amiss when a nice glass of Rioja in the middle of Madrid costs just €1.90. As Spain’s credit rating approached ‘junk’ status yesterday the country recorded a dramatic decline in house prices for the first quarter. The scale and impact of the problem is everywhere visible on the city’s streets. A rising homeless population

Out of the deep

It is a pretty toothy jaw of hell that Philip II of Spain, the Doge of Venice, and the Pope kneel before in prayer in a famous El Greco painting of the late 1570s. Philip and the other rulers of the so-called Holy League might just observe within hell’s mouth the skeletons of those they deemed