Bryan Appleyard
Some Capital Painters
The Company of Artists: The Origins of the Royal Academy of Arts in London
By Charles Saumarez Smith
Modern Art Press 192pp £25 order from our bookshop
When Joshua Reynolds was offered the presidency of the new Royal Academy in 1768, he first consulted with his close friends, Samuel Johnson and Edmund Burke. From the perspective of the Olympic-plagued, Boris-bothered London of the 21st century, such information is painful. One wonders at the depth of one’s misfortune at not having been alive in London at a time when career advice could be had from Johnson and Burke; or, more important, when one could have watched the foundation of an institution such as the Royal Academy.
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
It's 'all lively and entertaining but rather too black and white. Her account of British politics and the success of the Brexit campaign verges on the cartoonish.'
@David_Goodhart on Anne Applebaum's 'Twilight on Democracy'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-tale-of-two-parties
'Robert Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books, once asked Isaiah Berlin who his ideal dinner guest would be. Without hesitation Berlin exclaimed, ‘William James!’'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/the-pragmatists-progress
'She digs her images into her story, so that they blow up like psychic land mines when the reader’s perception brushes against them.'
Hilary Mantel reviewing Margaret Atwood: a #BookerPrize double-header from the archive.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/a-realist-with-wings