Gillian Tindall is gifted with an archaeological imagination. She is haunted by the hidden or partially obscured, by traces and fragments that, if carefully investigated, can reanimate the past. She is especially good at looking at corners of cities – in previous books, Kentish Town, Southwark and Bankside – in order to discern what lies beneath. Whereas we might look with disaffection at sheet-glass office blocks, dreary industrial buildings, car parks, and wasteland dense with litter, she sees merely a palimpsest, in which old buildings have been rubbed out to make way for new. With X-ray eyes, she uncovers layers of history in all its diversity.

Literary Review

Jun 2012

Categories

Frances Spalding

Fine Lines

A Woman Sitting Alone

Bloomsbury and Beyond

Firing the Imagination

At Home in Kensington

Palpable Hits

Weighty Matters

Art and Maternity

Pain’s Painter

Gay At Heart

She Wrote as if She Were Hemming a Skirt

Born to Paint

Angel of the North East

Adventures In Dreamland

‘A New Mystery and Gaiety’

Last of the Bloomsberries

‘That Necessary Article Cash’

Back in the Frame

Artist of the Floating World

Menace in the Mundane

Viennese Whirls

In Pursuit of Good Form

Painting the Blues

Upsetting the Apple Cart