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.
‘Abroad … is it worth the trouble of getting there?’ So begins Rose Macaulay’s alphabetical journey through the mixed pleasures of existence. First published in 1935, this reissue comes at a moment when Abroad is once again hedged about with difficulty. The bureaucratic obstacles ‘that crouch and snarl before you’ like dragons no longer include...
‘Hotel by the Sea’ (1946)
Three women, all in their way members of the higher bohemia, were having lunch in a London restaurant. Agnes Magruder was a grand Bostonian, ‘a character from a Henry James novel’ according to her daughter. She was known as ‘Magouche’, the name given her by the painter Arshile Gorky, with whom she had a turbulent marriage...
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.
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 the first...
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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