Bookowski's Blog — Deborah Fry

Working in Grand Days one day, putting some new old books on the shelves, I came across Iris Origo’s Images and Shadows and was delighted.  I’d read a review of it and four other books of hers in London Review of Books (The Italianness of it All by Tessa Hadley, 24 May 2018) and had put her into that long list of ‘must read’s in the back of my mind. I had assumed from her name that she must be Italian and that drew me in from the start.  I have long loved Italy and things Italian and have been...

It’s very hard to choose, but Henri Matisse’s painting, The Conversation, is my favourite of all his works.  It is a big painting of Mr and Mrs Matisse poised for speech but at that captured moment apparently silent, he standing, in a pair of blue and white striped pyjamas, hand in pocket; she sitting in her black dressing gown with green trim. They face each other and one feels the tension between them.  There is a balcony behind them and a garden beyond. For a long time I had assumed the conversation to be happening at night-time, but outside it...

My friend Rob recently gave me this beautiful wondrous book because he loved it.  I loved it too and gave it to Grand Days’ Tom. It isn’t new; it appeared in 1967, written by a modest, private man who lived all his life in a small rural town in Essex, UK.  It won the Duff-Cooper prize, the pre-eminent literary prize of the time and has been cited as one of the most important books in the twentieth century on nature writing. But have you heard of it?  I hadn’t.  For many years it was out of print but Baker’s writing...