Country Life Magazine – September 27, 2023: The new issue features The Need For Tweed; A perfect pre-trained gundog; A new Jacobean drawing room is the crowning glory at Shilstone, Devon, and more…
The need for tweed
A true Hebridean hero weaves his magic to create an ‘estate’ Harris tweed for David Profumo
Here’s one I trained earlier
Has your over-excited pup left you red-faced on a shoot day? Katy Birchall has the answer: a perfect, pre-trained gundog
Loved to life
A new Jacobean drawing room is the crowning glory at Shilstone, Devon, discovers John Goodall
LA Review of Books (Autumn 2023) – The latest issue features The Funny Thing About Misogyny; The New Scarcity Studies: On Two New Socioeconomic Histories and Endgame Emotions: The Melting of Time, the Mourning of the World…
THE FUNNY THING about misogyny is it’s structured like a joke. Not a very good joke—a groaner, a dad joke. Why are they called “women”? Because they’re a woe to men. Get it? Woman is a container for man; language engenders gender subordination. As Mike Myers recites on stage in his role as a moody slam poet in the thrillingly zany 1993 Hitchcockian send-up So I Married an Axe Murderer, “Woman! Whoa, man. Whoaaaaaa. Man!”
Scarcity: A History from the Origins of Capitalism to the Climate Crisis by CARL WENNERLIND
WATER FALLS FROM the sky, literally. It is the most abundant chemical compound on Earth, and yet many people buy it in plastic bottles. Nestlé and other corporations source water cheaply and add labels that depict something other than heavy-industry and fossil-fuel derivatives, as though you’re drinking straight from a pristine spring. By bottling this natural resource and selling it as a commodity, Nestlé creates a form of scarcity.
London Review of Books (LRB) – October 5, 2023: The new issue features Animal Ethics; Orca Life – We may understand less about orcas than they do about us, and Why Weber? – Weber insists that everything remain in its rightful place. Politicians should stick to politics, and scientists to science.
We may be tempted to throw up our hands and say: fuck it, I’m having a burger. Peter Singer would think this illogical: we should endeavour to do the least harm we can. But we might wonder whether something is wrong with the ethical approach that has led us to this point.
By the Seine – Vincent van Gogh – Paris, May-July 1887
Van Gogh Museum (September 22, 2023) – In the 19th century, bridges and trains made it easier to visit places outside of Paris. And yet smoking factory chimneys increasingly dominated the horizon. This exhibition reveals how artists captured these changes in their artworks.
‘And when I painted landscape in Asnières this summer I saw more colour in it than before.’
Vincent van Gogh to his sister Willemien van Gogh, late October 1887
Bank of the Seine – Vincent van Gogh – Paris, May-July 1887
‘Van Gogh along the Seine’
13 October 2023 until 14 January 2024
Five ambitious artists – Van Gogh, Seurat, Signac, Bernard and Angrand – travelled to the banks of the Seine to paint. Surrounded by green, they captured the changes ushered in by the burgeoning industry. Here they found new, contemporary motifs and developed their use of colour and painting techniques. Asnières had a particular impact on the artistic development of these artists.
At various moments in “Elon Musk,” Walter Isaacson’s new biography of the world’s richest person, the author tries to make sense of the billionaire entrepreneur he has shadowed for two years — sitting in on meetings, getting a peek at emails and texts, engaging in “scores of interviews and late-night conversations.” Musk is a mercurial “man-child,” Isaacson writes, who was bullied relentlessly as a kid in South Africa until he grew big enough to beat up his bullies. Musk talks about having Asperger’s, which makes him “bad at picking up social cues.” As the people closest to him will attest, he lacks empathy — something that Isaacson describes as a “gene” that’s “hard-wired.”
“The Vaster Wilds” follows a girl’s escape from a nameless colonial settlement into the unforgiving terrain of America.
By Fiona Mozley
Jamestown, Va., the first permanent English settlement in the Americas, very nearly didn’t survive. A few years into its existence, in the early 1600s, the majority of the population had succumbed to famine and disease. The period known as the Starving Time has taken on allegorical status. Jamestown is the colony that tried too much too soon; that underestimated the harsh climate, the foreign land, its existing, Indigenous population. Pilgrims went in search of heaven and found hell.
The Booker Prize (September 20, 2023) – The shortlist has been announced! It features six books by authors never previously shortlisted, including two debuts.
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2023. A patch of ice on the road, a casual favour to a charming stranger, a bee caught beneath a bridal veil – can a single moment of bad luck change the direction of a life?
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2023. Chetna Maroo’s tender and moving debut novel about grief, sisterhood, a teenage girl’s struggle to transcend herself – and squash
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2023. A mother faces a terrible choice, in Paul Lynch’s exhilarating, propulsive and confrontational portrait of a society on the brink
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2023. Full of lyricism and power, Paul Harding’s spellbinding novel celebrates the hopes, dreams and resilience of those deemed not to fit in a world brutally intolerant of difference
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2023. An exhilarating novel-in-stories that pulses with style, heart and barbed humour, while unravelling what it means to carve out an existence between cultures, homes and pay cheques
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2023. In her accomplished and unsettling second novel, Sarah Bernstein explores themes of prejudice, abuse and guilt through the eyes of a singularly unreliable narrator
The Week In Art Podcast (September 21, 2023): This week: the latest controversies prompted by the Unesco World Heritage Committee. As we mentioned last week, the 45th session of the committee is taking place in the Saudi Arabian capital, Riyadh, and continues until 25 September.
The founder of The Art Newspaper, Anna Somers Cocks, joins host Ben Luke to look at the latest sites granted World Heritage status and at the Committee’s decision not to add Venice to the organisation’s endangered list. We ask: is Unesco so mired in politics that it cannot adequately perform its role? The Colombian artist Fernando Botero died last week, aged 91, and we talk to the gallerist Stéphane Custot, of Waddington Custot galleries in London, about this painter and sculptor who drew ire from many critics but achieved widespread public acclaim.
And this episode’s Work of the Week is October’s Gone . . . Goodnight (1973) by Barkley L. Hendricks. As a group of paintings by Hendricks goes on display among the masters at Frick Madison in New York, Aimee Ng, co-curator of the exhibition, tells us about the painting.
Barkley L. Hendricks: Portraits at the Frick, Frick Madison, New York, until 7 January 2024.
Times Literary Supplement (September 22, 2023): The new issue features Playing with Fire – The limitless ambition of Elon Musk; Peter Brown in an antique land; The new New Journalism; A literary critic and murderer; John Gray’s Hobbes for liberals, and more…
Walter Isaacson’s intimate account of a tech titan
When Elon Musk was a child, his parents warned him against playing with fire. His response was to take a box of matches behind a tree and start lighting them. Scenes like this are frequent in Walter Isaacson’s new biography of Musk, who has become the world’s richest person thanks to his disdain for authority, instinct for the dramatic and “reality-bending wilfulness” (and because he has applied these traits to good ideas). Isaacson reports that the family’s motto is “Live dangerously – carefully”, but a more apt one might be the maxim quoted by Musk’s cousin Peter: “Risk is a type of fuel”.
JOURNEYS OF THE MIND – A Life in History by Peter Brown
In the late 1970s, the historian Peter Brown dumped his old dinner jacket on a park bench in Berkeley, California. It was not just a minor act of charity to the local homeless, who may or may not have welcomed a cast-off “tuxedo”. Brown had recently moved from an academic career in Oxford and London to a post in the United States, and he was signalling to himself a new start in what seemed to be a more democratic, less hidebound educational system: more jeans and trainers than black tie. He has been based in America ever since.
Phillips (September 18, 2023) – From Phillips’ London gallery, Specialist and Head of Sale Rebecca Tooby-Desmond provides an expert look into a selection of pop art staples, including Roy Lichtenstein’s ‘Two Nudes,’ Robert Indiana’s ‘The Book of Love,’ and Andy Warhol’s ‘Electric Chairs.’
News, Views and Reviews For The Intellectually Curious
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Phillips
