John McEwen
Gilty Love
A small point of etiquette – why is it Sir Thomas Lawrence but not Sir Michael Levey? Sir Michael, of course, was knighted for his directorship of the National Gallery. And no one has done more to rescue the reputation of Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769–1830), the most successful British portraitist of the nineteenth century: child prodigy, already in professional demand by the age of ten; Painter to the King at twenty-three in succession to Reynolds; Royal Academician at the youngest permissible age of twenty-five; and President of the RA for the last ten years of his life.
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Perception is a weird thing. Lawrence Durrell saw Hydra as a ‘great horned toad’ but Henry Miller thought it resembled a ‘huge loaf of petrified bread’. Niko Ghika painted it as a series of neat white and orange squares.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-call-of-the-wine-dark-sea
The minimalist Fumio Sasaki 'confesses that as he began to purchase fewer consumer goods, his meals shrank in size. He decluttered and lost weight. Accumulation is not just an economic way of life but a form of embodiment too. Enlightenment is reduction.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/gardens-of-emptiness
'The river’s desecration mirrors Colombia’s long history of violence: "for years we treated it like a sewer," says Ahmed, a survivor of a particularly brutal paramilitary massacre, "just like we treated each other".'
Patrick Wilcken on the Magdalena.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/troubled-waters-3