Reviews and News:
How 19th-century children ate: "Foundling Hospital took a great deal of care with the welfare of the children and was a very different place from the workhouses (and gruel) that would inspire Dickens's Oliver Twist. The exhibition's curator Jane Levi worked from a vast number of documents, images and also recordings made with children in the 20th century, describing the latter as an extraordinary, must-visit-to-hear archive.'The fair number of records show that it was run by a typical bureaucracy who wrote down every detail,' says Levi. 'The records cover the full 200-year history of the Foundling Hospital, describing everything from infant feeding to older children. We can see on a daily or weekly basis what was ordered, what arrived, how much was spent and can also see the diet tables.'"
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The Great Wall of China, paved.
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Claude Monet's water lilies.
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Over at The Washington Free Beacon, I take a look at John le Carré's memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel: "The point of these 'true stories from memory,' Le Carré writes, is to 'reclaim' them as his own following the publication of Adam Sisman mostly sympathetic biography last year and 'tell them in my own voice and invest them as best I can with my own feelings.' As far as I can tell, that feeling is primarily a desire to be liked.
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In Case You MIssed It:
Camus's 1940 Paris: "From March to May 1940, Albert Camus was…finishing a draft of the book he was calling The Stranger. The city, eerily calm, overtaken with a sense of dread, was weeks from the German invasion. Paris has changed enormously since 1940, but you can still walk in Camus's footsteps through places that a few literary specialists have put on the map and come close to a moment of artistic creation."
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London's lost rivers: "The Fleet is perhaps the most famous of London's lost rivers; it was once large enough for boats to navigate it, and an anchor has been discovered as far up as Kentish Town. As for the lower stretch of the Fleet, its earliest recorded cargo were the stones that built the old St Paul's Cathedral in the early 12th century, but by the 18th century it had degenerated into the Fleet Ditch, so filthy that Alexander Pope, in his poem The Dunciad, wrote that children swam 'where Fleet-ditch, with disemboguing streams/ Rolls the large tribute of dead dogs to Thames.' The innocuous grey tarmac of Farringdon Road covers a wealth of river-related stories and secrets. What makes London's lost rivers quite so tantalising is that they are not entirely lost — traces remain, offering us clues to what lies beneath. Sometimes, as with Farringdon Road, it is the shape of a street which gives the river away."
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New technology used to read previously unreadable Dead Sea scroll: "Nearly half a century ago, archaeologists found a charred ancient scroll in the ark of a synagogue on the western shore of the Dead Sea. The lump of carbonized parchment could not be opened or read. Its curators did nothing but conserve it, hoping that new technology might one day emerge to make the scroll legible. Just such a technology has now been perfected by computer scientists at the University of Kentucky. Working with biblical scholars in Jerusalem, they have used a computer to unfurl a digital image of the scroll."
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Barton Swaim never cared for the seemingly "deliberately incoherent" music of Gustav Mahler until he attended a performance of the composer's Ninth Symphony in Edinburgh: "The SRSO played cleanly and lyrically but with violent lunacy at the right moments, even the notoriously difficult brass unerring in its execution. Indeed in Ninth's tutti passages, and particularly in the haywire coda of the third movement, the orchestra was almost deafening—aurally and mentally devastating, no doubt as Mahler intended it to be. As I listened to this colossal work of art, engrossed by it and actually enjoying it for the first time, I tried to think of an analogy for what Mahler had done. Writers trying to find ways of explaining Mahler's music frequently draw on images and metaphors of death, and fair enough; the Ninth Symphony's final movement is pretty obviously a long, death-like farewell. But there is far more than death here. Perhaps Mahler was attempting to do something akin to what the writer of Genesis attempted in narrating the life of Joseph. It is a sprawling story that takes in greatness of character and inextinguishable human love, but also mischance, pettiness, hatred, stupidity, deceit, self-absorption, greed, and of course death. The story is an intensely beautiful one, including though it does many unsavory details one might have assumed a myth-making historian would leave unrecorded. It is the story (to put it briefly) of how one vicious and cowardly act of human trafficking turns out to be, in the sublime superintendence of God's quiet governance, the very thing that keeps a tribe of families from destruction. 'You meant evil against me,' says Joseph at the story's end, 'but God meant it for good.' So much of a Mahler symphony is jarring and confusing and unhappy, but somehow he stitches its themes together in ways that always seem natural—his transitions never sound forced—and the whole, once you're able to take it in, forms a thing of great humaneness and power. I wonder the degree to which Mahler had internalized this Judaic aesthetic, if that's not an unduly literary way to put it."
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Classic Essay: Henry St. John Bolingbroke, "On the Spirit of Patriotism"
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Interview: Ben Domenech talks with former Governor of Virginia, Bob McDonnell, about his fight against corruption charges and his faith.
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