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, and presents ‘London Revisited’ on the LRB’s Close Readings subscription podcast.

When Deborah Cavendish,​ duchess of Devonshire, died at the age of 94 in September 2014, the obituary headlines rang the changes on ‘the end of an era’ and ‘the last of the Mitford sisters’. If the first was true, the second was not. It sometimes feels as if we shall never hear the last of the Mitfords. What Jessica, one of Deborah Devonshire’s older siblings,...

The initials​ are hard to decipher, but whoever he was, the French master at Surbiton County Grammar School in 1966 is probably dead by now. Even if he is alive, he is unlikely to recall his exasperated verdict on the shortcomings of the 14-year-old Martin Parr: ‘utterly lazy and inattentive’. For Parr, the consequences were more far-reaching, and in the short term disastrous:...

In the early​ 1970s, the Scottish artist Rory McEwen painted several pieces he called True Facts from Nature. Like most of his work they are botanical subjects, sharply painted in watercolour on vellum, a technique that achieves a shimmering luminosity. True Facts from Nature No.12 (c.1973) sets out six specimens equidistant in a row. Each is a fragment, but each has the quality of...

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...

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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