Last year, fans of modernist Irish literature and impressionist art saw a must-own volume go under the hammer at Bonhams. “In 1935 the French artist, Henri Matisse, was commissioned to illustrate an edition of Ulysses for subscribers to the Limited Edition Club in America,” announced Artlyst. “Each of the 1,000 copies was signed by Matisse and […]
I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia. The mirror troubled the depths of a corridor in a country house on Gaona Street in Ramos Mejia; the encyclopedia is fallaciously called The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia (New York, 1917) and is a literal but delinquent reprint of the Encyclopedia Britannica […]
Manuscripts, photographs, paintings and personal items among the displays in honour of playwright who died in city. Paris will hold its first major exhibition on the life and work of Oscar Wilde next month, co-curated by his grandson. Wilde, who spoke fluent French, was an ardent Francophile who regularly visited the city, eventually dying there […]
For a man who left Bromley Technical High School with just one ‘O’ level (in art), David Bowie ended up a remarkably well-read man. Bowie, who died aged 69 on January 10 2016, said that “when I’m relaxed what I do is read” and described a good week as one in which he pored through […]
My wife, Susan, and I lost our minds. For more than two weeks at the beginning of February, we were locked in a ritual that became the center of our day, the center of our conversation—watching first the six-hour original 1979 BBC version of John le Carré’s “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” (not to be confused […]
A new illustrated edition of Finnegans Wake, as imagined by artist John Vernon Lord for the Folio Society, matches James Joyce’s extravagant word games with elaborately collaged pictures, shedding a brilliant new light on Irish literature’s ‘book of the dark’. Here, Lord explains the thinking behind the images. Frontispiece The frontispiece illustration doesn’t apply to […]
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold provided me with my first experience of the film trade, and in retrospect it was an unusually benign baptism of fire. The director and I got along fine. I enjoyed an amiable relationship with the screenwriter, who as a former instructor in the black arts at a […]
James Joyce died 75 years ago this week, leaving a lifetime of books beloved by many… and Ulysses, heralded as both the best novel in the English language and the hardest to read. So what do you do if you get stuck? When James Joyce finished writing Ulysses, he was so exhausted that he didn’t […]