Linkissage
From today's Guardian:
Laurence Norfolk likes Judith Flanders' Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain.
Kathryn Hughes on new group biography of the Impressionists, and useful meditations on this genre:
Group biographies are popular at the moment for a variety of reasons. For one thing they get around the dreary insistence that one follow a single subject from cradle to grave, instead allowing the biographer to swoop in on the interesting bits of the life and skim the rest. They also, as here, allow the biographer to lean heavily on secondary material yet still arrange it in a way that feels fresh and valid. Finally, and most subtly, group biographies speak to something in all of us that is concerned with issues of belonging and not belonging. Reading about the Romantics, the pre-Raphaelites, the Bloomsburys and the Impressionists allows us to rehearse our own conflicts about friendship, loyalty, inclusion and exile. For the Impressionists, just like any other group, were never as coherent or static as the label implied. They lived, as Roe persuasively shows, in a constant muddle of alliances and counter-alliances, fallings-out, reconciliations and, perhaps most painful of all, plain indifference. They lived, in short, just like the rest of us.
And on the subject of group biographies, Simon Callow clearly much enjoyed Stanley Wells' Shakespeare and Co: Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Dekker, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, John Fletcher and the Other Players in His Story.
Michel Faber on Yet Another Book on Van Meegeren and His Vermeer Forgeries: the strapline suggests that Faber 'admires the brushstrokes', but he's actually quite critical, clearly not in sympathy with the author's belief that 'he's absolutely sure what's art and what isn't', and pointing out that 'Hidden beneath the surface layers of I Was Vermeer are several previous studies of Van Meegeren, long out of print'. However, he concedes that 'Despite this book's flaws, I'm glad it exists. Van Meegeren's story is fascinating and deserves to remain in the public consciousness''.
John Sutherland (about whom I am somewhat ambivalent most of the time) is quite interesting on opening lines and their often ironic or at least complex relationship to the following narrative.
And the charming and touching story of Leonard Woolf's late romance with Trekkie Parsons, another exemplar of how relationships which go far away from conventional models can be rewarding for the parties concerned. I rather look forward to Glendinning's biography.