Edouard Manet’s Le Printemps (1881). Up for grabs (of a sort) on November 5th
This week’s links:
Secretive, arrogant and reckless: the young T.E. Lawrence began life as he meant to go on
“Obsessed with notions of chivalry, he spent his summer holidays cycling around England, making brass rubbings of crusaders’ tombs; his boyhood bedroom was ‘hung with treasures found on these outings… life-size figures of knights in armour and priests in elaborate vestments.’“
Deus Ex Musica
Veneration of Beethoven is crowding his successors out.
The Rise and Fall of the Abstract Art Boom
From formal exhibitions to the dust jackets on novels, “Figurative art is back. Abstract art, in all its weird and wonderful forms, is on the way out.”
Father of History
Herodotus was as much a storyteller as a recorder, but his histories are all the better for it.
Richard Flanagan Wins Man Booker Prize
For The Narrow Road to the Deep North, a “magnificent novel of love and war.” Says the author: “In Australia the Man Booker prize is sometimes seen as something of a chicken raffle. I just didn’t expect to end up with the chicken.”
From our pages:
The Ambiguous witness of Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The complicated legacy of the anti-Nazi theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer.