Through much of human history, the number three has been imbued with power. The number three also entered presidential history in a new way this week with Trump’s third indictment, writes Jane Greenway Carr.
Tom Crewe · On the Shelf · LRB 13 April 2023 lrb.co.uk - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from lrb.co.uk Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Necrophiliacs and dancing bears: meet the wild artists of the Society of Dilettanti
A series of works on show at Sir John Soane’s Museum was funded by an 18th-century group who were truly mad, bad and dangerous to know
20 May 2021 • 5:00am
In their cups: various members of the Society of Dilettanti (1778), as painted by Joshua Reynolds
Credit: Alamy
All the boisterous patrician privilege of the Bullingdon Club crossed with the artistic hunter-gatherer instincts of the Tate trustees: that was, approximately, the Society of Dilettanti, founded in 1734 by some aristocratic courtiers around Frederick, the Prince of Wales who would predecease his father, George II. They had returned reluctantly from their classical tours in Italy “desirous of encouraging at home a taste for those objects which had contributed so much to their entertainment abroad”.
Country Life
Trending: The Dunmore Pineapple. Photo: Angus Bremner/Landmark Trust Credit: Angus Bremner/Landmark Trust
From the Americas to the roof of country-house follies, Matthew Dennison traces the journey of the pineapple, one of Georgian Britain’s most coveted fruits.
In the summer of 1767, it was a source of some surprise to the writer of the Manchester Mercury that Edward Higgins, committed to Carmarthen Castle for burglary, hadn’t included among booty stolen from the home of Mrs Biven of Laugherne any pineapples.
Having made himself comfortable in Mrs Biven’s kitchen to the extent of spreading a cloth on the table and lighting two candles in silver candlesticks before eating a chicken Higgins ‘got over a Wall into the Garden, and went into the Hot-house, where were many Pine-Apples fit to take’. Higgins, however, ‘took only four Cucumbers’.