Lesley Downer visits the new Hokusai exhibition at the British Museum. The British Museum Hokusai exhibition is full of dazzling works yet The Great Wave still leaps out. Its strong, rhythmic, instantly recognisable lines have made it quite simply iconic. The froth of the waves, as Vincent Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo, is […]
Clean Minds, Dirty Books
What’s the dirtiest book you’ve ever read? Writers’ research can lead to awkward places. “Oh yes?” says my wife, glimpsing a passage of Walter’s My Secret Life on my screen. “You’re ‘researching’ again, are you?” Private Case, Public Scandal by Peter Fryer was the peculiar tome that pointed me to the explosion in the Victorian […]
Irving Finkel and the Ark
In the year 1872, George Smith, a British Museum assistant, astounded the world by discovering the story of the Flood – much the same as that in the Book of Genesis, but older – inscribed on a cuneiform tablet made of clay that had recently been excavated at Nineveh in Mesopotamia. So excited was Smith […]