Sarah Bradford
Shared Passions
John Piper, Myfanwy Piper: Lives in Art
By Frances Spalding
Oxford University Press 584pp £25 order from our bookshop
In the final paragraph of this intertwined biography of John and Myfanwy Piper, Frances Spalding writes of Myfanwy’s death on 18 January 1997. It happened at Fawley Bottom, the Oxfordshire farmhouse where she had lived for sixty-two years, mostly ‘with John, in a complementary relationship which had permitted two individuals, with different gifts and personalities, to act like pillars of the same arch, creating an axis through which and around which people and ideas came and went’. A few pages earlier she quotes John Mortimer on John’s funeral:
The sun came out and brightened the churchyard. The church was full of flowers from the Piper garden and the gardens of friends. His grandchildren read poetry, and three tall grandsons and his youngest son carried him to his resting place beside a sunlit field. It was all that John Piper had loved and which he had made the subject of his art: flowers, an English church in an English landscape.
John and Myfanwy were, indeed, a complementary couple; a fact they seem to have realised the moment they first laid eyes on each other in June 1934. Spalding describes how Piper, whose marriage to Eileen Holding was already unravelling, was staying for the weekend with Ivon Hitchens at
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
Twitter Feed
‘Miłosz was from first to last negotiating how poetry ... can “bear” the suffering all around without falsifying it. His was an austere vision of the poet’s calling.’
Rowan Williams on the life and work of Czesław Miłosz.
Rowan Williams - The Poet’s Burden
Rowan Williams: The Poet’s Burden - On Czesław Miłosz: Visions from the Other Europe by Eva Hoffman
literaryreview.co.uk
The ruler of Gwalior ‘named his son George after the British king. His counterpart in Bahawalpur ... boasted a collection of six hundred dildos, which Pakistan’s generals solicitously buried when they deposed him’.
@pratinavanil on India’s Maharajahs.
Pratinav Anil - Midnight’s Playboys
Pratinav Anil: Midnight’s Playboys - Dethroned: The Downfall of India’s Princely States by John Zubrzycki
literaryreview.co.uk
Dec’s Silenced Voices section of @lit_review features the scandalous criminalization of prominent 🇲🇪 academic Boban Batrićević (Faculty of Montenegrin Language & Literature)
His hearing for writing about hateful narratives spread by the Serbian Orthodox Church is on Jan 22nd
⬇️