Volume 46, Number 19 · December 2, 1999
The Real Thing
By Christopher Hitchens
Headlong
by Michael Frayn
Metropolitan, 342 pp., $26.00
A few weeks ago, his lordship the Earl of Wemyss and March, master of Gosford House in the Scottish county of East Lothian, disburdened himself of Botticelli's exquisite Virgin Adoring the Christ Child for a price of twenty million pounds sterling. Since the buyer was the Kimbell Museum in Texas, there was a fine old British row about treasures leaving the country, irresponsible noblemen denuding the national patrimony, and the failure of the National Gallery of Tony Blair's 'Cool Britannia' to come up with matching funds for the retention of the masterpiece. This is an old set-piece tale in Britain: I remember as a schoolboy at the age of ten being asked to subscribe my pocket money to keep a Leonardo cartoon in the United Kingdom. And the story loses nothing by the addition of a dim and acquisitive Scots peer. But what struck me most about the otherwise familiar newspaper coverage was this. Until the earl decided to realize his Botticelli on the Texas market, nobody knew it was there.
Review, 2618 words
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