Charles Saumarez Smith
A Life of Infinite Possibilities
Leonardo Da Vinci: The Flights of the Mind
By Charles Nicholl
Allen Lane The Penguin Press 502pp £25 order from our bookshop
MY FIRST THOUGHT on receiving Charles Nicholl’s biography of Leonardo was: who on earth needs another biography of Leonardo? After all, Freud pretty well invalidated the biographical approach to Leonardo’s art by pointing out how exiguous is our knowledge of his upbringing. Kenneth Clark provided one of the great and comprehensive lives of Leonardo in 1939 when he was Director of the National Gallery, and his biography is still in print. And Martin Kemp, Professor of Art History at Oxford, has spent most of his life working on Leonardo, has written widely on his life and work, and is just about to publish another book on him. What, I wondered, could a biographer of Marlowe and Rimbaud have to add to these accounts?
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Only in Britain, perhaps, could spy chiefs – conventionally viewed as masters of subterfuge – be so highly regarded as ethical guides.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-spy-who-taught-me
In this month's Bookends, @AdamCSDouglas looks at the curious life of Henry Labouchere: a friend of Bram Stoker, 'loose cannon', and architect of the law that outlawed homosexual activity in Britain.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-gross-indecency
'We have all twenty-nine of her Barsetshire novels, and whenever a certain longing reaches critical mass we read all twenty-nine again, straight through.'
Patricia T O'Conner on her love for Angela Thirkell. (£)
https://literaryreview.co.uk/good-gad