William St Clair
Taking Care Of Keats
Joseph Severn, A Life: The Rewards of Friendship
By Sue Brown
Oxford University Press 437pp £30 order from our bookshop
The story of Joseph Severn’s association with John Keats has often been told. The promising young artist to whom the Royal Academy gave a grant to study the old masters in Italy; his decision to accompany the sick Keats, who had been medically advised that warm Italy might alleviate his tuberculosis; Severn’s care of his dying friend during his final weeks, and then his campaign to promote Keats’s posthumous reputation. Visitors to the Protestant cemetery in Rome are still moved to see the two identically sized tombstones side by side: one with the broken lyre of the poet whose life was cut off in 1821 while full of promise at the age of twenty-five; and the other, with palette and brush, the respected artist who died in 1879 at the age of eighty-five.
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
'When the language starts functioning as a character in fiction, when it is there drawing attention to itself ... It’s not anything that anybody really takes seriously.'
Our interview with Anthony Burgess from 1983.
http://ow.ly/5u0y50yrjoO
'Sabotage became so prevalent that bankers even created their own terms – ‘asymmetric information’, ‘lack of financial literacy’, ‘the principal-agent dilemma’ – to describe how they might turn a dime from customers’ gullibility or ignorance.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/master-criminals-of-the-universe
'Unlike much that was extracted from India, these paintings were not plunder, and those who created them were properly remunerated and often received due credit.'
@PParkerWriting on 'Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company'.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/artists-for-hire