★★★★
The three books in Linda Proud’s Botticelli Trilogy provide a powerful, moving and life-affirming insight into Renaissance Florence. Essentially they are three instalments in the same book, so it makes no sense to speak of them individually: they need to be read and appreciated together. Following the life and career of Tommaso de’ Maffei, the books begin with his boyhood and his journey to Florence, where he earns his living as a scribe.
★★★★
There was apparently a very bad TV series about the Borgias in the 1980s, but fortunately I’m too young to remember that. Nevertheless, when I heard that the production company Showtime were following up The Tudors with The Borgias, I felt a frisson of excitement mixed with slight dread. The Tudors began with such promise, but I rapidly lost faith in a series which didn’t have the courage to show its protagonist ageing and thickening out. Its focus was not on the history, but on the series of unfeasibly Sloaney-looking girls who caught the eye of Jonathan Rhys Meyer’s implausible king.
Yesterday morning, at 8:30am, a full hour and a half before the gallery opened, I joined the queue which was already snaking around the National Gallery’s Sainsbury Wing. The hype in the press about this exhibition has been cranked up to fever-pitch and all advance tickets have now been sold. The only way to get in to see it is to queue on a morning in the hope of getting one of 500 tickets released every day. The anticipation and excitement in the queue were electric, and it was wonderful to be there with people who had gone to such great extremes to get tickets. One woman had come down from Nottingham and had got up at 3:30am in order to get to London on time to queue.
The Idle Woman 