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.
There were at least three Victorian ages, one of which, from around 1845 to 1861, might better be called Albertine. These were the years when the queen’s husband, Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, was largely responsible for setting the tone, the pace and the scope of the monarchy and so to some extent of the reign. Despite which, as a personality, he remained obscure. Caricatured in his...
There has been a certain amount of huffing and puffing among the usually imperturbable gallery-going set about David Shrigley’s Brain Activity exhibition at the Hayward (until 13 May). People who value the power of art to shock far too highly ever to be shocked by it themselves, have nevertheless been somewhat put out, complaining that Shrigley, who is best known as a cartoonist, should...
In the summer of 1771 William Constable had just returned to Burton Constable, his house in the East Riding of Yorkshire, after a lavish Grand Tour. He and his sister Winifred had spent £7000 and came home laden with pictures, sculptures, books and miscellaneous antiquities. Constable now regarded himself as a connoisseur or, as he put it, ‘a bit of a Vertu’. When the treasures were unpacked and tastefully disposed around the house, he turned his attention to the view from the windows and decided that it too needed bringing up to date in line with informed modern taste.
Not much happened in Camberwell during the riots. Morrisons was boarded up and there was some milling about on the Green one evening, but that was as far as it went. All around us, in Peckham, Brixton and at the Elephant and Castle, there was trouble, but this end of the Walworth Road, properly called Camberwell Road, was unscathed, or rather it remained scathed in the same way as before. From the Green northwards Camberwell presents a collage of changing use and disuse, a continuous Mexican wave of opening and closing shops and businesses, squats, pubs, charities and churches.
‘Gothic enough to hang bells in’ was, apparently, the response of one American visitor to a portrait of Edith Sitwell in the Tate. Elizabeth Bowen, herself an imposing physical presence, described Sitwell in real life as like ‘a high altar on the move’, and Virginia Woolf, on first encountering her in 1918, noted that she was ‘a very tall young woman, wearing a...
Rosemary Hill and Jeremy Harte discuss the many groups and stories that have emerged throughout the 20th century to challenge the narratives about Stonehenge presented by archaeologists.
For the third episode in her short series on Stonehenge, Rosemary Hill is joined by Seamus Perry to experience the stone circle through the mind and eyes of a Romantic, with the likes of Wordsworth, Blake,...
In the second episode of her short series looking at why Stonehenge has occupied such an important place in the story of Britain, Rosemary Hill talks to Kate Bennett about the two antiquarians, John Aubrey...
Rosemary Hill begins a new four-part series looking at what people have thought about Stonehenge over the past few hundred years, and why it’s come to matter so much in the story of Britain. In...
In the final episode in our series looking at the way history was transformed in the Romantic period, Neil MacGregor joins Rosemary Hill to discuss the circulation of artefacts throughout Europe in the...
In the third episode of her series looking at how history was transformed in the Romantic period, Rosemary Hill talks to Roey Sweet about the antiquarians, a new breed of multi-disciplinary investigators,...
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’...
Rosemary Hill looks at women and clothes, and what happens between them, in life and literature, in her 2018 LRB Winter Lecture.
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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