Jenny Uglow

A Master of Ambiguity

Hans Holbein evoked his subjects with uncanny verisimilitude, but leaves us to guess at his opinions of them.

Europe’s Great Emporium

Sixteenth-century Antwerp was alive with entrepreneurial merchants, rapacious moneylenders, whispering spies, and heretical ideas.

Veronese Preserv’d

Napoleon’s Greatest Trophy

How a Venetian masterpiece ended up in the Louvre.

Contagious Constitutions

Linda Colley shows in her new book that written constitutions developed both as a means of shoring up entrenched rulers and of turning successful rebellions into legitimate governments.

The Reader of Rocks

William Smith’s innovative use of the fossil record helped him create the first detailed geological map of England, Wales, and Scotland.

The Imperial Gardener

How Joseph Banks made the royal garden at Kew the most outstanding botanical collection in the world.

They Made London Their Own

A new book traces the multitudinous contributions of migrants to the capital, as well as their persistent exploitation.

Pandemic Journal

Dispatches from around the world documenting the coronavirus outbreak

Pandemic Journal, March 23–29

Brief dispatches by New York Review writers documenting the coronavirus outbreak around the world, including Michael Greenberg in Brooklyn, Raquel Salas Rivera in San Juan, Aida Alami in Paris, Rahmane Idrissa in Niamey, and more.

Garden of Painterly Delights

We are fed up with snow and floods and sad, bad news. In tune with this mood, thank goodness, the Garden Museum in Lambeth is showing an exhibition called “Sanctuary: Artist-Gardeners 1919–1939.”

David Bomberg’s ‘Desire to Emancipate’

Shocking his tutors, Bomberg was a blazing radical, influenced by Italian Futurists and by the Cubist experiments of artists he met in Paris on a trip with Jacob Epstein in 1913, including Picasso and Modigliani.

What the Weather Is

Beauty in Ingenuity: The Art of Science

A sense of excitement defines the exhibition, “The Art of Innovation: From Enlightenment to Dark Matter,” as visitors zig-zag through 250 years of art and science.

William Blake's Visionary Imagination

The Blake exhibition at Tate Britain, the first major exhibition in nearly twenty years, shows 300 of his prints and paintings, with manuscripts and printed books, gathered from galleries and libraries across the world.

Civility and Its Discontents

‘In Pursuit of Civility: Manners and Civilization in Early Modern England’ by Keith Thomas

Dora Maar’s Piercing Gaze

This haunting show, Dora Maar’s largest exhibition in France, contains over 400 of her works, yet, like the model in the banner advertising the exhibition, she turns away, and hides her face, remaining enigmatic in her work.

Big Talkers

‘The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age’ by Leo Damrosch

Czech Art and a De-Accessioning Row

“Czech Routes”—the fourth in a series, following shows of émigré artists from Germany, Poland, and Austria—contains works by twenty-one painters, printmakers, and sculptors who left Czechoslovakia at different times in the past century.

Airy & Otherworldly Japanese Poetry Prints

“Plum Blossom and Green Willow: Surimono Poetry Prints,” with its array of nineteenth-century Japanese woodblock poetry prints, transports us to another world.