Richard III’s Teeth
Richard III has become, once again, quite the celebrity. At this rate everyone will want to be buried in a car park. Of course his life story was tolerably interesting, as far as lives go, but his story as historical artifact is (with apologies to Robert Palmer) simply irresistible. The latest news thrown up after…
Ursula K Le Guin
Ursula K Le Guin has been awarded the USA’s National Book Award Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. The recipient recieves US$10,000 and is a person who has enriched the literary heritage of the USA over a life of service, or a corpus of work. The citation includes the following: For more than forty…
Cockatoos in Renaissance Art – rethinking what we thought we knew
This gorgeous still life hangs in the Los Angeles Getty Centre and last week I had the privilege of seeing it in person.* Check the date: it was painted in 1650. That’s 120 years before Cook ‘discovered’ Australia. So how on earth did an Australian cockatoo come to find itself featuring in a Renaissance artwork?…
The Trouble with Writing
The trouble with writing is that life seems to constantly get in the way. Michelle Huneven, a Californian novelist and journalist of whom I’ve never heard, put it much more articulately in her recent keynote address at the Writing Workshops LA: The Conference, which took place on June 28, 2014 at the Autry National Center in…