Rosemary Hill

Rosemary Hill’s most recent book is Time’s Witness: History in the Age of Romanticism. Her four-part series, The Lives of Stonehenge, can be found on the LRB Podcast. She is a contributing editor at the LRB. Having dismissed Constable, she is still pondering the subject of her next book.

At the Miho Museum: Habits of Seeing

Rosemary Hill, 22 May 2025

Difficulty​ is a key principle of the Picturesque. In a landscape garden, the eye must never be allowed to take in the whole view at once. The visitor passes through successive scenes by way of transitions that are often carefully complicated. Stepping stones across a stream are slightly uneven, the gap in a hedge is too narrow to pass through without a small push, the scale shifts from...

At Pallant House: On Dora Carrington

Rosemary Hill, 3 April 2025

The life​ and work of Dora Carrington have long been overshadowed by her death. As is often the way with suicides, later viewers find it hard to lose hindsight. For all the vivacity in many of her paintings, which seem to vibrate with joy in colour and form, she is often cast as a tragic figure. A less obvious factor in her relative obscurity is the obsessive cult of Bloomsbury. Lytton...

We alljudge by appearances. Oscar Wilde said that it is ‘only shallow people’ who don’t, but it might be truer to say that they fail to pay attention to the judgments they are making while they dismiss appearances as superficial. Nothing, as Wilde added, is more superficial than thought. For women, who may be assaulted, imprisoned or killed because of what they do or do...

Use your theodolite: Stone Circles

Rosemary Hill, 26 December 2024

Ring of Brodgar, Orkney

Daniel Defoe​, in his Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724-26), was unimpressed by the prehistoric remains. Arriving at the circle of nineteen standing stones at Boscawen-Un in Cornwall, he noted with baffled irritation that ‘all that can be learn’d of them is, That here they are.’ Stonehenge left early modern viewers cold....

From The Blog
29 November 2024

It is almost the inverse of the Disney parks where you pay to have a prepared experience offered to you. At Ghibli you are left to make your own experience, playing out your memories of favourite films or scenes. 

Leave me my illusions: Antiquarianism

Nicholas Penny, 29 July 2021

Moonlight on broken stone tracery is a common motif; dark interiors provide a foil for stained glass and for white satin and deep blue velvet. The men must be away on the crusades. Young women are sobbing...

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Very Pointed: Pugin

Dinah Birch, 20 September 2007

Modern lives look prim beside the turbulent existence of Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin. Distractions and misfortunes proliferated throughout his career: shipwreck (he was in his own boat,...

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