Reviews and News:
* *
Bronwen Riley’s “erudite and fascinating” The Edge of the Empire, a history of the Roman occupation of Britain.
* *
Edward Bulwer-Lytton was a dandy, a friend of Benjamin Disraeli, a member of the Conservative Party from 1852 onward, and the author of an anti-egalitarian dystopian novel. In The Coming Race, he uses “satire to blend the occult with the scientific, prophesying the dangers of utopian faith in egalitarian doctrine and technological advancement.”
* *
16th-century props found at Curtain Theatre site.
* *
T. S. Eliot’s conservative modernism.
* *
Malcolm Forbes reviews Timothy Garton Ash’s “fact-filled” book on free speech in the modern world.
* *
The opera The Book Collector opened on Friday in Dayton. Ernest Hilbert (whose latest book of poems I’ll be reviewing in my bi-weekly book column at The Free Beacon) wrote the libretto.
* *
The US returns stolen Columbus letter, but questions remain: “This much is known: American officials returned a letter to Italy on Wednesday that was written by Christopher Columbus in 1493 on his return from the New World. The letter had been stolen from a library in Florence and then ended up as a donation to the Library of Congress in 2004. What remain a mystery — or at least the subject of a continuing investigation — are the crucial particulars to fill in the gaps of an intriguing, international case of whodunit.”
* *
Essay of the Day:
In The New York Times, Tim Parks writes about a visit to the Corsini family outside Florence and their 600-year-old family archive:
“Built in the 14th century but massively enlarged in the 16th, Villa le Corti is a half hour from Florence by winding road. The sweep of vineyards and olive groves is breathtaking, as is the view of the villa, a white stuccoed pile topped with two towers set in geometric lawns. Do not, however, expect comfort inside. When Duccio and his wife, Clotilde, moved here in 1992, the house had not been lived in for almost a century. ‘Because,’ Duccio observes knowingly, ‘when you have so much it gets hard to use it all.’ The couple renovated a small part of the building for themselves, transformed the cellars under the lawn into a restaurant and a shop for their wine and olive oil production and started arranging visitor attractions such as cooking lessons and wine-tasting sessions.
“But the rest of the house stood empty. The decision last year to have the archive moved here from its previous home in the family’s grand palazzo in Florence was thus part of a business plan to bring the villa back to life — the papers attract a steady stream of scholars — and place it at the heart of the family enterprise. “In the end,” remarks Duccio, ‘it was mostly about money.’
“Moving the Corsini papers was itself extremely expensive, the largest operation of its kind since Florence’s huge state archive was relocated in 1989. Four thousand feet of steel shelving had to be set up and more than 12,000 files resettled. Since the villa wasn’t in any way designed for this purpose, there is no specific entry point, nor any easily apparent order to the rooms. All the same, wherever you come in to the archive you are immediately overwhelmed by an intense awareness of paper. This is not the experience of an ordinary library where parallel lines of standardized print in neatly bound volumes seem to detach the words from the material they depend on. Here, bundle after bundle of raw papers are tied together with string and squeezed into shelves, from floor to ceiling. There is the thick sepia-toned, slightly porous paper of the 1400s and the ultrathin glossy correspondence paper of the 19th century. There are papers with elaborate watermarks, and with tiny cuts made in the 16th century to show that the surface had been disinfected against the plague. Some papers have been eaten away by silverfish; others have gotten wet and smudged. Scratchy nibs have poked holes. A name is missing. A date. At every point you are made conscious of the moment in which event was turned into document.”
* *
Image of the Day: Cliffs
* *
Poem: Sydney Lea, “Spilled Milk”
Get Prufrock in your inbox every weekday morning. Subscribe here.
