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Angus Trumble

Angus Trumble, who died suddenly last October, was a towering figure with a slight sideways tilt to his head. In his famously dandyish attire he might have stepped out of a Max Beerbohm cartoon, and appropriately so given his expertise in Victorian and Edwardian art. Trumble’s latest, and last, subject also chimes with one of Beerbohm’s earliest literary ventures, ‘A Defence of Cosmetics’, published in 1894.

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The bar is set high

It was a great pleasure to read this year’s Calibre winning and commended essays in ABR. The essays written by Jane Goodall, Kevin Brophy and Rosa-leen Love continue the impressive tradition inaugurated by Elisabeth Holdsworth with her memorable work that won the first Calibre Prize. The bar is set high.

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Edwardian Opulence is the book for the sumptuous survey exhibition of Edwardian art which was shown at the Yale Centre for British Art from 28 February to 2 June 2013. It is a sweeping look at the visual arts in Britain in all its manifestations during the period roughly corresponding with the reign of Edward VII. This substantial book contains important essays by the curators, Angus Trumble and Andrea Wolk Rager, as well as contributions from leading art historians such as Tim Barringer, Pamela Fletcher, Elizabeth C. Mansfield, and Alexander Nemerov. Many of the paintings, sculptures, photographs, and works of decorative art in this publication reflect the supreme self-confidence and wealth of the ruling élite at that time. However, it was also a period of dramatic change; and this too is reflected in the publication.

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The British Museum’s connection with Australia goes right back to 29 April 1770, when Captain Cook landed at the place he called Botany Bay because of the large number of plant specimens gathered there by Joseph Banks, one of the Museum’s most influential early trustees. As a polyglot public institution dedicated by Act of Parliament (1753) to allowing any citizen to study and understand the whole world, past and present, the British Museum was a magnet for generations of Australian colonists visiting and revisiting the imperial capital, especially artists. This was as true for Arthur Streeton, Fred McCubbin, George Lambert, Bertram Mackennal, and Rupert Bunny as it was much later for Sidney Nolan, Fred Williams, Brett Whiteley, and many other twentieth-century Australian artists. No doubt it will continue to be true of those members of future generations of Australians who visit London.

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‘I kept thinking: if his face looks like this, what must his balls look like?’ David Hockney’s assessment of the craggy countenance of W.H. Auden is clipped and convenient, but I suspect Auden would have been far more interesting on the subject of sitting for Hockney. Given the concentration and quality of the encounters between English portrait painters or sculptors and their subjects, it is slightly odd that more writers have not published accounts of the experience of sitting for their portrait.

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The Hare With Amber Eyes tells the migration story of ‘a very large collection of very small objects’, specifically 264 netsuke (pronounced like ‘jet ski’, from the Japanese characters for ne and tsuke, meaning ‘root’ and ‘attach’). Netsuke are small pieces of ivory, wood, metal, ceramic, or some other material, carved or otherwise decorated, and perforated for use as a toggle that tucks behind the belt or sash of a kosode or kimono (obi). From it a purse or more usually a small box with compartments (inro) may be suspended by a stout silken cord, and fastened with sliding beads (ojime). Netsuke evolved in seventeenth-century Japan to embrace an almost limitless number of decorative forms and shapes, increasingly prized, through the eighteenth century, as miniature sculptures on their own, nevertheless conforming to the basic requirement of their original function: namely, to allow a cord to be threaded through some sort of eye – in the case of the eponymous hare with the amber eyes this is achieved by the contrivance of a cocked hind leg; such strategies became more and more ingenious as netsuke proliferated – and also adhering to a roughly uniform size of between one and two inches in diameter, occasionally more. Ideally, netsuke nestle comfortably in the palm of the hand. Indeed, part of their aesthetic appeal is to the sense of touch, so deployed.

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‘This book is a celebration of art that doubles as a critique of religion,’ writes Peter Conrad in the introduction to this enormous book. Neither aim is especially unusual, but their ambitious fusion here creates a questing mesh of narratives, huge in scope, in which architecture, music, literature, drama, motion pictures, poetry and philosophy in many schools and eras are gathered under the sprawling rubric of art, and no religious tradition is excluded. At times it feels as if you are reading a book about everything, and its restlessness carries you through thirty-three extremely solid, occasionally indigestible chapters, beginning with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

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I was going to say that this is the first time I have ever forgotten to meet somebody for dinner, but I have in fact done it before, as our forbearing editor will attest. Is this the beginning of Alzheimer’s? It was written in my diary, in red capitals. I certainly remembered on Monday. However, I drifted through yesterday in that blissful cloud of unknowing that one imagines people who take drugs pay good money for. After work I went home, warmed up the stew, and afterwards tried to find something to watch on telly – without success. I then did the laundry, got into bed and read the Times Literary Supplement. At no stage did I experience even the faintest hint of disquiet arising from the fact that I needed to be in another spot where a distinguished visitor was waiting in vain for me to arrive. What makes it so much worse is that my dinner date was staying at the Duncan, and therefore endured the solicitous inquiries and increasingly pitying glances of ancient staff and dubious fellow guests. Eventually he gave up. Part of my penance is to go and sit in the lobby.

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Dennis Altman

In any given year we will read but a tiny handful of potential ‘best books’, so this is no more than a personal selection. Here are two novels that stand out: Stephen Eldred-Grigg’s Shanghai Boy (Vintage) and Hari Kunzru’s Tranmission (Penguin). Both speak of the confusion of identity and emotions caused by rapid displacement across the world. The first is the account of a middle-aged New Zealand teacher who falls disastrously in love while teaching in Shanghai. Transmission takes a naïve young Indian computer programmer to the United States, with remarkable consequences. From a number of political books, let me select two, both from my own publisher, Scribe, which offers, I regret, no kickbacks. One is George Megalogenis’s The Longest Decade; the other, James Carroll’s House of War. Together they provide a depressing but challenging backdrop to understanding the current impasse of the Bush–Howard administrations in Iraq.

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Some weeks ago, I visited my friend Leideke Galema, a Dutch nun who lives in comfortable retirement on the outskirts of Arnhem in the eastern Netherlands. I knew Miss Galema years ago when, living in the belfry of the church of S. Agnese in Agone on the Piazza Navona in Rome, she and her co-religious Miss Koet hired me as a general dogsbody, telephone-answerer, plant-waterer and errand-runner. It was heaven.

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