I’m relatively confident that the fact that whenever I see an image of Charles Wilson Peale pulling back a luxurious crimson curtain in his famous self portrait “The Artist in His Museum” and immediately recall the character Riff Raff, expertly portrayed by Richard O’Brien, opening an upright coffin in the The Rocky Horror Picture Show says absolutely nothing good about me whatsoever.
Sir Winston Churchill once famously remarked “Dogs look up to you, cats look down on you. Give me a pig! He looks you in the eye and treats you as an equal.” At least so said Sir Anthony Montague Browne, Sir Winston’s private secretary. And for my part, I very much hope he did – […]
What with all the museums having been closed for so long now (don’t even remind me of the Humboldt exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum that never even opened…), I was very pleased to be graced with the arrival recently of a new book from Smithsonian Books that is essentially a museum exhibition of Henry Walter Bates’ journals from his Amazon explorations in the mid Nineteen Century presented in printed and bound form.
When Maren Meinhardt’s “A Longing for Wide and Unknown Things; the Life of Alexander von Humboldt” was published in early 2018 by Hurst Publishers in London, it received quick and widespread praise from both literary as well as scientific reviewers. Unfortunately, as is the case with all-too-many excellent non-fiction works published in Great Britain these days, it never made its way across the Atlantic.