Kathryn Hughes

Nov 6, 2024 | the-tls.co.uk | Charles Darwent |Kathryn Hughes |Rod Mengham

That Xanti Schawinsky may be an unfamiliar name calls for an explanation. Born Alexander Schawinsky in Basle, Switzerland, in 1904, he enrolled at the Bauhaus in Weimar in the year when he turned twenty, 1924. This alone should guarantee familiarity. His teachers at the school – Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, László Moholy-Nagy, etc – need no introduction.

Nov 6, 2024 | the-tls.co.uk | Kathryn Hughes |Lauren Elkin |Aaron Peck

For years Isabella Stewart Gardner had been searching for a suitable Manet to hang in her eponymous Boston museum. Finally, in 1910, Bernard Berenson, acting as her adviser and scout, wrote excitedly that he had found just the thing. The picture in question was “colossal” and “vigorous”. Gardner snapped it up, and from that moment “Eugénie-Désirée Fournier Manet” (c.1866) became one of the first things visitors encountered on stepping into the museum’s Blue Room.

Nov 18, 2023 | thetimes.co.uk | Kathryn Hughes

In her celebrated essay A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf creates the figure of Shakespeare’s sister. “Judith Shakespeare” is as clever and as verbally agile as her brother William. But while he strides to fame and fortune, her life plays out in a minor key. There is domestic drudgery, an unwanted pregnancy, professional rejection, leading to an exhausted death by suicide. Judith goes to the grave with her genius unfulfilled.