The Position of Spoons and Other Intimacies

Few British writers are as adept as Deborah Levy at enacting Hilary Mantel’s advice to writers: to make the reader “feel acknowledged, and yet estranged”. Levy’s approachable but oblique novels look like realism, but come riddled with psychological trapdoors and unstable narratives, while her trilogy of memoirs takes the reader in hand more directly. Her new book – a collection of 34 essays, stories and short texts too unclassifiable to be labelled – combines the best of both approaches. John Self, The Guardian

Alan Bennett at 90

Bennett has come to accept that “old age is a subject. You write about what you’re given. And I hadn’t expected to have anything to write about by now.” Killing Time is set in a home for the elderly. He started it a few years ago but set it aside because Allelujah! (2018), his most recent stage play, was set in a hospital elderly care ward: “I didn’t want to become the bard of geriatric medicine!” Mark Lawson, The Guardian

e poi Alan Bennett continua a parlare, parlare di tutto e tutti...

Meet the Italian ‘Fruit Detective’

When Isabella Dalla Ragione assesses a Renaissance painting, she doesn’t immediately notice the brushstrokes or the magnificence of the imagery. The first thing she notices is the fruit.

She steers us to one more Madonna with Child, the center of an altarpiece painted by Bernardino di Betto, better known as Pintoricchio, in 1495 or 1496. It is all glimmering blues and reds and golds. “Look, there,” she exclaims, pointing to the bottom of the painting. At the Madonna’s feet, just off the gold hem of her azure robe, are three gnarly looking apples—oddly shaped varieties you’d never see in a market today. 

For most viewers, they would be an afterthought. For Dalla Ragione, the apples, including a variety known in the fruit science lexicon as api piccola, represent a key to restoring Italy’s disappearing fruit agriculture, with characteristics not found in today’s apples: Crunchy and tart, they are capable of being stored at room temperature for about seven months and maintain their best qualities outside the fridge. Mark Schapiro, Smithsonian