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.
The first time I remember meeting Carmen was at a London Review Christmas party. She came up to me and said: ‘You’re marvellous darling, you understand irony.’ I’m not sure whether she actually poked me in the chest but I felt as if she had. Then she moved off without further comment.
The sisters of artists are doomed to bear the brunt of their brothers’ disappointments, or so Balzac’s struggling poet Lucien tells his sister, Eve, at the start of a long letter home listing his difficulties. Having come to Paris to seek love and fame he has found neither. He is broke and has had to take a furnished room in the Hôtel de Cluny, a derelict...
Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill was the first private house to be built in the Gothic style. It began modestly in 1747 as a suburban riverside villa near Twickenham, leased to a Mrs Chenevix who ran a novelty shop at Charing Cross. Gradually it was transformed into what Walpole, wilfully misquoting Pope, referred to as a Gothic Vatican. The house acquired a Green Closet, an armoury,...
For much of the 20th century, geography and history were treated as separate subjects: ‘maps and chaps’, as the saying had it. It is an anomalous distinction, but oddly persistent. While human perception does not divide time and space along the lines of academic disciplines, attempts to bring them together often have a disruptive effect on the institutions concerned with...
In January , when the 1921 census became available, I decided to look for my father. He was six months old in the summer the census was taken and children are usually easy to find in the records. They don’t move independently and rarely change their names. I didn’t expect much from the search because I already knew where he was born, but it was an excuse to play with a new...
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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