Rosemary Hill’s most recent book is Time’s Witness: History in the Age of Romanticism. Her four-part series, Romantic History, can be found on the LRB Podcast. She is a contributing editor at the LRB.
Flower arranging occupies a lowly rung in the English cultural hierarchy. Somewhere between handicraft and hobby and associated mostly with women, it conjures up images of 1950s housewives filling the suburban afternoons or savage competition at the WI. Constance Spry had no time for any of that. The first and still one of the few flower arrangers to become a household name, she pointedly...
‘What were you like as a child?’ Dick Cavett asked Edward Gorey on his talk show in November 1977. ‘Small,’ he replied. Gorey, who died in 2000 at the age of 75, did not like to talk about himself or his work, which depended, like the Japanese literature he admired, ‘very much [on] what is left out’. Someone who thought of himself principally as a writer,...
Above Primark, at Nos. 14-28, is the handsome faience frontage of the former Lyons Oxford Corner House. At No. 8, above McDonalds, there is the ‘robust brick front with crowning gablet in the Waterhouse-Romanesque manner, per haps of c.1880’ that was once a tailor’s or clothier’s shop. These are the traces of the changing retail patterns of the 19th century: from small to big, from individual stalls, bazaars and arcades to giant specialised emporia and department stores.
Like poison, the revenge memoir is a weapon of the weak. A person unlikely to prevail in an open fight will naturally resort to indirect methods. This is often the case for women, whose sex and apparent insignificance has rendered them invisible. During the Second World War it was felt necessary to run a propaganda campaign warning men that women could hear what they were saying. The...
‘Irepresent things as I see them,’ Aubrey Beardsley said, ‘outlined faintly in thin streaks (just like me).’ Beardsley, who died at 25, passed his brief life in the fin-de-siècle milieu of Max Beerbohm and Oscar Wilde. Like them, he was his own artefact. Immensely thin and hollow-eyed with long fingers and a large nose, he seemed to the actress Elizabeth Robins,...
In the 1740s the Scots were invading England and the wearing of tartan was banned. By the 1850s, Queen Victoria had built her Gothic fantasy in Aberdeenshire and tartan was everywhere. What happened in...
In the first episode of a new four-part series looking at the way history was transformed in the Romantic period, Rosemary Hill is joined by Tom Stammers to consider how an argument over the ‘improvement’...
Mary-Kay Wilmers and Rosemary Hill join Joanna Biggs and Tom Crewe to talk about the state of our clothes.
Rosemary Hill looks at women and clothes, and what happens between them, in life and literature, in her 2018 LRB Winter Lecture.
Rosemary Hill answers the Dowager Duchess’s question from Downton Abbey.
Rosemary Hill surveys British propaganda from the Second World War, including the work of Abram Games and Edward McKnight Kauffer.
Rosemary Hill discusses Angela Carter's poetry and early career, and introduces her new edition of the poems, Unicorn.
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...
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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