Epitaph on a Tyrant

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
He knew human folly like the back of his hand,
And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.

by W. H. Auden

Free Speech 1940 Grace Golden (1904-1993) 1940
Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom 2000 Anselm Kiefer born 1945
Kosciusko (Illustration to ‘The Pleasures of Hope’)  c.1835 Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851)
[no title] 1979-82 Jenny Holzer born 1950
Featured image is a detail from: Maquette of a Monument Symbolising the Liberation of the Spirit by Antoine Pevsner 1952.
JosieHolford

Recent Posts

The Soul of Nature: Caspar David Friedrich and Byron’s Childe Harold

A cold, wet February day - perfect backdrop for a journey into Romanticism—off on the…

2 days ago

DEI and Getting Back on Track

Dialogue with Dignity I’ve been thinking about issues of racial justice since I was a…

2 weeks ago

In Love with London Fog

I kept coming across paintings of London by Yoshio Markino - gauzy portraits of a…

2 weeks ago

The Horizontal Man

There’s something irresistible about a crime story set in a school or college. Like the…

4 weeks ago

A Better Class of Train

The two-forty-five express — Paddington to Market Blandings, first stop Oxford—stood at its piatform with…

1 month ago

The Reverse Ferret and the Vicar of Bray

Changing your mind is perfectly normal—and often essential. After all, it’s what education is all…

2 months ago