Clare Bucknell is a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. She is the author of The Treasuries, a social history of poetry anthologies.
In marine painting of the Dutch Golden Age, weather isn’t merely a backdrop. Skies are characterful, vehicles for drama and mood. Dark clouds, towering above ships, may be warnings; windless air and slack sails can suggest calm, exhaustion or frustration. But weather is also an opportunity for verisimilitude.
Eleanor Catton’s characters enjoy playing other people. Mira Bunting, the twenty-something founder of Birnam Wood, an activist gardening collective, maintains a ‘rotation’ of aliases for undercover purposes. To glean information about a property listing in the small town of Thorndike in New Zealand, she transforms – via a fake email account – into Mrs June...
‘Real tennis’ is a good example of a retronym, a new name invented from an old one in order to adapt to technological advancement. Until the game we know as ‘tennis’ (formerly ‘lawn tennis’) came along, real tennis was tennis.
At the Paris Salon of 1822, the young French artist Adrienne-Marie-Louise Grandpierre-Deverzy exhibited The Studio of Abel de Pujol, a painting of her teacher’s workshop. More than a dozen female trainees are shown going about their business. A little group looks over de Pujol’s shoulder as he critiques a sketch; others make copies from paintings selected for their improving...
If you were to make a film of Gu Byeong-mo’s The Old Woman with the Knife, you’d need a lot of extras. In the novel’s public spaces, no one does anything remotely out of the ordinary without bystanders gathering, staring or pretending not to stare. An old man tips over a rubbish cart in the middle of the road and is given a ‘pointed look’ by one onlooker,...
The story of Macmillan’s marketing and its advertising of a ‘GOLDEN TREASURY SERIES’ of volumes is not just a piece of publishing history, but part of the shift from sacred to secular culture in...
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