Century, 240pp, £14.99 Every so often, someone reopens a forgotten door into the natural world and magic ensues. In May 1924, the British cellist Beatrice Harrison found such an opening when she arranged a live BBC recording in her garden – accompanied only by the sound of a nightingale. The performance soon became a global phenomenon, offering something “all of us in this busy world unconsciously crave and urgently need”, as Lord Reith wrote at the time. Sam Lee, a folk singer and Pan-like intermediary for wilder things, now picks up where Harrison left off. His book tells the story of humanity’s relationship with the nightingale in all its international and artistic depth; from Byzantine song to the Blitz. Through this, Lee also shares his contemporary journey into the nightingale’s “melodious plot”, stretching through his co-performances with the birds, live lockdown broadcasts and the recent Extinction Rebellion protest in Berkeley Square. At a time when the UK
Edmund de Waal, the master potter and memoirist, subscribes to the famous imagist dictum: “no ideas but in things”. This book is an exquisite and profound coda to The Hare With Amber Eyes, his bestselling personal history of a branch of his maternal family, the Ephrussi banking dynasty, told through the few surviving treasures – a trove of Japanese netsuke, including the hare – that escaped Nazi looting. Here he returns to that same milieu..
Letters to Camondo by Edmund de Waal review – Proustian evocation of the belle époque theguardian.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from theguardian.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
New volume in Frick Diptych Series focuses on Titian s Pietro Aretino
Titian. Pietro Aretino, ca. 1537. Oil on canvas. 40 1/8 × 33 3/4 inches. The Frick Collection, New York. Photo: Joe Coscia.
NEW YORK, NY
.-The Frick Collection announces the sixth title in its popular Diptych series. The new volume, available at Frick Madison and through the museums website, focuses on Titians extraordinary portrait of the famed Italian writer, poet, playwright, and satirist Pietro Aretino. Each book in this series focuses on a single work in the Fricks collection and includes an essay by a curator complemented by a contribution from a contemporary cultural figure.