The Real and the Romantic: English Art Between Two World Wars – A Times Best Art Book of 2022

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Yes, there’s a love story so Cashel is a romantic in that respect but he is also a romantic in outlook, being driven by impulse and circumstance, rather than by thoroughly thought through plans. The differences are that Ross is naive (he is duped repeatedly) and his romantic nature seems to come down to a lack of self-awareness or willingness to think about his life, something he describes as 'following his heart'. The second of William Boyd's 'whole life' works I have read, following on from Any Human Heart, which is one of the best books I've read in recent years.

The Real and the Romantic: English Art Between - Waterstones

I've been going through something of a reading slump lately and this was absolutely the book to get me out of it. Ross involves himself in an unlikely escapade; it appears to go well; it turns out exceptionally badly; Ross escapes through some quirk of chance. If I hadn't been so excited about Boyd writing another, set this time in the 19th century, I wouldn't be so disappointed now. The book is presented as a biography, complete with footnotes, pieced together from a bundle of letters, notes, maps and photographs which apparently fell into Boyd’s hands several years ago.A rover by nature, he travels to mainland Europe, Asia, Africa and America as his various schemes and his travails play out. As i finished the book, I found myself thinking at first that the end - Ross's death - felt a tad underwhelming. The character of Cashel Greville Ross shares some qualities with Henry Paget Flashman (to make matters worse). There’s schoolboy masturbation; there’s extraordinary fortune smiling on our main man in whatever predicament presents itself.

THE REAL AND THE ROMANTIC — British Art Fair

There is a gleeful attitude in playing fast and loose with history and certain details, such as the unfortunate end of the Nile explorer John Hanning Speke, which could easily have emerged from the pages of George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman chronicles.When he was offered a college lecturership, which would mean spending more time teaching, he was forced to choose between teaching and writing. From a rickety studio in the garden of No 1 Eldon Road, Kensington, in December 1918, the painter Frances Hodgkins wrote to her mother in New Zealand about life in postwar London.

The real and romantic: the life and work of Eric Ravilious The real and romantic: the life and work of Eric Ravilious

It's described in the preface as a novel based on the true story of a late eighteenth/early nineteenth century adventurer, Cashel Greville Ross. Since all the work produced by the scheme belonged to the government, this represents his largest set of publicly held pieces, including many in which he successfully coped with new subjects, often involving the human figures he had previously tended to ignore.Throughout these years, the pursuit of 'the real' was set against, and sometimes merged with, an inclination towards the 'romantic', as English artists sought to respond to their subjects and their times.