Podcast Interview
On the TLS podcast, I discussed my review of Judith Flanders' 'A Place for Everything' with Stig Abell and Thea Lenarduzzi
James Waddell
Freelance writer and early modernist. Winner of Benjamin Franklin House Literary Prize and Art Fund Writing Competition. Words in The Economist, Times Literary Supplement, Prospect, 1843 etc.
Podcast Interview
On The Economist's 'The Intelligence' podcast, I discussed the 150th anniversary of the Met Museum
Accident of initial letters
Review of 'A Place for Everything: The curious history of alphabetical order' by Judith Flanders
A sober sesquicentennial for the Met Museum
Though the 150th birthday celebrations will be muted, the occasion is an opportunity to reflect on a great institution’s history
"Book murderer": Why debates on the way we treat our books aren't actually about reading
Why do people cleave so strongly to one side or another of the bibliographical culture war?
Spiky and descending
David Rundle's 'The Renaissance Reform of the Book and Britain' contains several strokes of adept codicology
Nativity plays occupy a vexed place in Britain’s national psyche
Rather like horror movies, nativities have reflected Britons’ fears
Barn burner, axe, death growl, metalhead
On the art, temperament and ideology of the indexer
Animals endowed with reason
A collection of correspondence revealing the surprisingly privileged lives of 18th-century Huguenots
How nightclubs and cabarets incubated radical art
From the 1880s to the 1960s, cosmopolitan hangouts helped foster the avant-garde
Jostling atoms
How to break down the structure of a book
The variegated symbolism of gardens in art
Rarely are they neutral spaces, as a new exhibition in Berlin shows
Republic of letters
The vast publishing output of the Netherlands in the seventeenth century
A new adaptation of “Small Island” tells Britons their nation’s story
“Small Island”—adapted from a novel by Andrea Levy that was published in 2004—unpicks the complex, vicious tangle of power relations between coloniser and colonised, insider and outsider
The personal trauma that lies behind Edvard Munch’s unnerving art
He was fascinated by psychology and haunted by mental collapse
An intriguing new adaptation of Chekhov’s “Three Sisters”
The risk of staging a play about ennui is the possibility of instilling the same feelings in the audience
The Elizabethan age in miniature
A new exhibition shows how two master miniaturists of the 16th century – Nicholas Hilliard and Isaac Oliver – captured their era
“Leave to Remain” considers love in a hostile environment
In a new musical, with songs by Kele Okereke, Brexit causes a relationship to change course
The economic sensibilities of “A Christmas Carol”
In his festive tale, released 175 years ago, Charles Dickens prescribed not Marxist revolution or Victorian beneficence but free trade and commerce
An adaptation of “White Teeth” shows how Britain has changed
Eighteen years after Zadie Smith’s debut novel was published, its multicultural optimism is a distant memory
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