Tim Richardson
Happy Horticulturalists
The Brother Gardeners: Botany, Empire and the Birth of an Obsession
By Andrea Wulf
William Heinemann 356pp £18.99 order from our bookshop
Ever since Sir Nikolaus Pevsner suggested, in the Architectural Review in 1944, that the eighteenth-century landscape garden was Britain's greatest contribution to the visual arts of the West – with the possible exception of Perpendicular Gothic architecture – the gates to the garden have been ajar to scholars from the disciplines of art and architectural history. This has been greatly to the benefit of garden history as a subject in its own right, even if most art historians have tended to confine themselves to a few key gardens, such as Stowe and Stourhead.
Literary historians have also made useful forays into the shrubberies, temples and grottoes, decoding the double lives of garden-obsessed poets such as Alexander Pope and William Shenstone. Recently, the political motivations behind the development
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'The trouble seems to be that we are not asked to read this author, reading being a thing of the past. We are asked to decode him.'
From the archive, Derek Mahon peruses the early short fiction of Thomas Pynchon.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/rock-n-roll-is-here-to-stay
'There are at least two dozen members of the House of Commons today whose names I cannot read without laughing because I know what poseurs and place-seekers they are.'
From the archive, Christopher Hitchens on the Oxford Union.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/mother-of-unions
Chuffed to be on the Curiosity Pill 2020 round-up for my @Lit_Review piece on swimming, which I cannot wait to get back to after 10+ months away https://literaryreview.co.uk/different-strokes https://twitter.com/RNGCrit/status/1351922254687383553