Category Archives: Arts & Literature

Preview: The New Yorker Magazine – Sept. 30, 2024

A child walks toward an adult who is seated on a bench in a park.

The New Yorker (September 23, 2024): The latest issue features Pierre-Emmanuel Lyet’s “Shadow Story” – The artist attempts to preserve the most perfect time of year.

How Trump Hopes to Exploit the Myth of Voter Fraud in November

How Trump Hopes to Exploit the Myth of Voter Fraud in November

For years, the former President has claimed that undocumented immigrants vote illegally. That fiction is now the explicit position of the Party establishment. By Jonathan Blitzer

The Priest Who Helps Women in the Mob Escape

The Priest Who Helps Women in the Mob Escape

Don Luigi Ciotti leads an anti-Mafia organization, and for decades he has run a secret operation that liberates women from the criminal underworld. By D. T. Max

Which Party Has Cornered the Tattoo Vote?

Which Party Has Cornered the Tattoo Vote?

Lauren Boebert has a “tribal” design on her midriff, but there’s competition from John Fetterman and the tattoo caucus—and don’t forget John F. Kennedy or Theodore Roosevelt. By Charles Bethea

Inside Art: Van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers & Yellow’

The National Gallery (September 22, 2024): What colour do you think of most when you think of Vincent van Gogh? Probably his glorious use of yellow – most famously in his series of ‘Sunflowers’ paintings.

Dive in with Catherine Higgitt from the National Gallery’s scientific department to discover the secrets of how he used chrome yellow pigment in his work. You’ll even see the chemistry of how this fantastic colour is made.

London Review Of Books – September 26, 2024 Preview

London Review of Books (LRB) – September 20 , 2024: The latest issue features T.J. Clark on Fanon’s Contradictions; Linda Kinstler at the 6 January trials; Sally Rooney’s Couples and Kubrick Does It Himself….


Byzantine Intersectionality: 
Sexuality, Gender and Race in the Middle Ages by Roland Betancourt

At the Movies: ‘Only the River Flows’ by Michael Wood

From Tudor to Stuart: The Regime Change from Elizabeth I to James I by Susan Doran – Clare Jackson

Kubrick: An Odyssey by Robert P. Kolker and Nathan Abrams – David Bromwich

Arts/Books: Times Literary Supplement – Sept. 20, 2024

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Times Literary Supplement (September 18, 2024): The latest issue features ‘Autumn Fiction’ – Rachel Kushner, Olga Tokarczuk, László Krasznahorkai and Sally Rooney; Craig Brown on The Queen; A very Yorkshire horror; China’s Britain complex and The Looting of America…

Country Life Magazine – September 18, 2024 Issue

Country Life Magazine (September 17, 2024): The latest issue features…

The legacy

Amie Elizabeth White hails king of cutlery Harry Brearley, whose stainless-steel invention was —  like himself — ‘made in Sheffield’

Country Life’s little-known gems of the Cotswolds

Jane Wheatley swerves the honeypots to share some of the region’s lesser-known places to eat, shop, stay or unwind

Dem bones, dem bones

The world’s first named dinosaur was found in the beautiful Oxfordshire village of Stonesfield. Ben Lerwill meets the Megalosaurus

A taste of the exotic

From coatimundis in Cumbria to scorpions in Kent, Victoria Marston introduces some of Britain’s most exotic residents

One bray at a time

The stoic and devoted donkey is often misunderstood, but it is capable of melting the hardest of hearts, as Katy Birchall learns

Marking time in the Cotswolds

Penny Churchill showcases the best country houses for sale in this sought-after region

Out of the ordinary

Annunciata Elwes scours the Cotswolds property market for something a little different

Geraldine Collinge’s favourite painting

The art-gallery director chooses a spectacular, nightmarish work

Revealing the Roman Cotswolds

Clive Aslet investigates the role of antiquarian Samuel Lysons in recording the excavation of Roman villas in the Cotswolds      

Love in an elevator

Country house lifts have been going up in the world ever since Queen Victoria’s day, as Melanie Cable-Alexander discovers

Interiors

Ideas and inspiration for your kitchen, with Amelia Thorpe

Where the north wind doth blow

Tiffany Daneff is blown away by panoramic views and weatherproof planting in the garden at Coates Barn in Warwickshire

Kitchen garden cook

Melanie Johnson pairs pears with both sweet and savoury

Foraging

Oyster mushrooms are a woodland delicacy, but vegans might be put off by their carnivorous tendencies, reveals John Wright

The good stuff

Hetty Lintell is on the prowl for luxurious leopard-print pieces

Travel

Steven King heads to Hungary to discover how autumn mists make Tokaji wine irresistible

We band of brothers

Octavia Pollock marvels at the medals of yesteryear, finding that many of their mottos and motifs are works of art in their own right

Right as rain

Michael Prodger dodges the showers to examine drizzle, downpour and deluge in art

The spy who came onto the stage

The first stage adaptation of a Le Carré novel is compelling viewing, says Michael Billington

Preview: The New Yorker Magazine – Sept. 23, 2024

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The New Yorker (September 16, 2024): The latest issue features Christoph Niemann’s “Smoke and Mirrors” – The latest trends are often derived from unexpected places…

The Presidential Campaign, After Philadelphia

Part of the intrigue has been which movement would run out of steam first: Trump’s MAGA, through its failures, or Obama’s liberalism, through its successes. By Benjamin Wallace-Wells

The Art of Taking It Slow

Contemporary cycling is all about spandex and personal bests. The bicycle designer Grant Petersen has amassed an ardent following by urging people to get comfortable bikes, and go easy. By Anna Wiener

The Anguish of Looking at a Monet

More than beauty, more than color, the artist reveals the doubts that bind us. By Jackson Arn

The New York Times Book Review – Sept. 15, 2024

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (September 15, 2024): The latest issue features ‘Making Art and Selling Out’ = In Danny Senna’s fleet, funny novel “Colored Television”, a struggling writer in a mixed-race family is seduced by the taste of luxury….

Debt Was Supposed to Cure Poverty and Help Pay for College. What Went Wrong?

Three new books examine debt’s fraught politics and history.

Ketanji Brown Jackson Looks Forward to Reading Fiction Again

The Supreme Court justice has been drawn to American history and books about the “challenges and triumphs” of raising a neurodiverse child. She shares that and more in a memoir, “Lovely One.”

Arts & Culture: The New Criterion -October 2024

The New Criterion – The October 2024 issue features…

Democracy in America: a symposium

Tocqueville’s limitations by Glenn Ellmers

Democracy in America: an introduction by Roger Kimball

Our Athenian American democracy by Victor Davis Hanson

Tocqueville versus progressive democracy by Daniel J. Mahoney

The Washington octopus by James Piereson

Art Reviews: Gagosian Quarterly – Fall 2023

Gagosian Quarterly Fall 2024 | Gagosian Quarterly
Detail from Andy Warhol’s Mao (1972)

Gagosian Quarterly (Fall 2024) – The new issue features Jessica Beck discussing Andy Warhol’s Mao series, contextualizing Warhol’s return to painting in the early 1970s and his attraction to subjects of notoriety. We dig into the archives to honor the inimitable Richard Serra, who had over forty exhibitions at Gagosian since his first in 1983. Elsewhere in the issue, Salomé Gómez-Upegui examines the work of artists confronting the climate crisis, and Péjú Oshin speaks with Jayden Ali about his expansive view of architecture.

In Conversation – Christopher Makos and Jessica Beck

Christopher Makos and Jessica Beck

Andy Warhol’s Insiders at the Gagosian Shop in London’s historic Burlington Arcade is a group exhibition and shop takeover that feature works by Warhol and portraits of the artist by friends and collaborators including photographers Ronnie Cutrone, Michael Halsband, Christopher Makos, and Billy Name. To celebrate the occasion, Makos met with Gagosian director Jessica Beck to speak about his friendship with Warhol and the joy of the unexpected.

The Art History of Presidential Campaign Posters

The Art History of Presidential Campaign Posters

Against the backdrop of the 2020 US presidential election, historian Hal Wert takes us through the artistic and political evolution of American campaign posters, from their origin in 1844 to the present. In an interview with Quarterly editor Gillian Jakab, Wert highlights an array of landmark posters and the artists who made them.

Literary Previews: The Paris Review – Fall 2024

Paris Review Fall'24

Paris Review Summer 2024 (September 10, 2024) — The new issue features:

Not Enough about Frank: A Visit with James Schuyler

Peter Schjeldahl

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From left, Frank O’Hara, John Button, Schuyler, and Joe LeSueur, ca. 1960. © Estate of John Button, courtesy of CLAMP, New York.

James Schuyler on Frank O’Hara: “I still can see Frank, standing on that street corner outside a pastry shop, holding a neatly tied-up box of God knows what—éclairs, perhaps.”

James Schuyler was born in Chicago in 1923, grew up in Washington, D.C., and East Aurora, New York, and spent most of his adult years in New York City and Southampton, Long Island. Although he is perhaps less widely known than the fellow New York School poets with whom he is associated, John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, Barbara Guest, and Kenneth Koch, he published six full-length books of poetry during his lifetime—beginning with Freely Espousing, published by Doubleday and Paris Review Editions in 1969—as well as two novels, and a third written in collaboration with Ashbery. In 1981 he won the Pulitzer Prize for his collection The Morning of the Poem (1980). Mental illness plagued him intermittently, and there were times when his life threatened to veer out of control, but friends repeatedly rallied around him, and the years before his death in 1991 were happy and productive. 

Javier Cercas on the Art of Fiction: “Hell, to me, is a literary party.”

Prose by Josephine Baker, Caleb Crain, Marlene Morgan, Morgan Thomas, and Fumio Yamamoto.

Poetry by Hannah Arendt, Matt Broaddus, Sara Gilmore, Benjamin Krusling, Mark Leidner, James Richardson, and Margaret Ross.

Art by Ayé Aton and Ron Veasey, and cover by Sterling Ruby.