I was 17 when I got signed and swooped up into the industry side of things. It was really fun and exciting, you know; we were hustling, we were doing this pop thing. But, I always found myself coming head to head with them, and feeling like I wasn’t being true to myself in one way or another. In the end it wasn’t for me, I’m too controlling, and I want to be able to make music the way I want to do it.” Within his 80+ year lifespan, Cashel Greville Ross will fight at Waterloo where Napoleon made his last stand…enter the inner circle of Percy Shelley, his wife Mary Shelley, and the legendary Lord Byron…set out in search of the source of the Nile where he will meet up with the famed explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton and the duplicitous John Hanning Speke..and become inadvertently involved in the smuggling of Greek antiquities. Being the biography of Cashel Greville Ross, born in Ireland in 1799, buried in Venice over eighty years later, a picaresque, episodic narrative, reminiscent of Barry Lyndon or one of those Victorian novels originally serialised in a magazine. Veteran biographer Frances Spalding, known for her insightful books on the early British Modernists Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and Roger Fry, turns her penetrating gaze on the interwar years'

The Real and the Romantic: English Art Between Two - AbeBooks The Real and the Romantic: English Art Between Two - AbeBooks

Paul Nash, Gwen John, Henry Moore, Eric Ravilious, Ben Nicholson and Stanley Spencer all feature in this fresh and enlightening new look at English art between 1918 and 1939, which travels from modernism to English pastoral and embraces a host of lesser male and female figures in its broad and highly assured sweep' The lifelong association that Cashel carries with him as a Waterloo veteran reminded me of Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March in which Captain Joseph Trotta saves the life of the young Kaiser Frank Joseph 1, on the battlefield at Solferino. Henceforth the “Hero of Solferino” is a label which travels with the Trotta family. I suspect am also probably comparing it unfairly to the end of Logan Mountstuart in Any Human Heart (which I found really moving and actually left me a bit teary). A gloriously old-fashioned and sumptuous read. William Boyd is as good as ever as he ages. He's now in his Seventies and his writing is as fine as ever. This is a "whole life" novel telling the fictional story of Cashel Greville Ross, whose long life spans the 19th Century. Here his instinct for the innate symbolic quality of objects and their strangeness has full play, as well as his fondness for snow and night skies. Ravilious became fascinated by submarines and spent time on board one of them to prepare lithographs for a projected book. Although relatively small numbers of these seem to have been printed, they are striking images, conveying the domesticity of life as well as the discomfort and danger.The Romantic is one of the books on the longlist for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2023 but it had been on my RADAR long before that. The Romantic has been compared by other readers to one of William Boyd’s earlier books, Any Human Heart, which is also a ‘whole life’ story, albeit set in a different period. I haven’t read that book although it is on my virtual TBR pile.

The Real and the Romantic: English Art Between Two World Wars The Real and the Romantic: English Art Between Two World Wars

Two strong women become central to the story; Contessa Raphaella Rezzo; and widow Mrs Frances (Frannie) Broome. Both women are interesting but from their character descriptions, and their actions, it becomes difficult to differentiate between the two, who occupy different parts of the world, and the narrative. Boyd uses the description ‘cavaliere servante’ to describe Raphaella. Bookended by the intensity of commemoration that followed World War I and by a darkening of mood brought about by the foreshadowing of World War II, the decades between the wars saw the growing influence of modernism across British art and design. But as modernism reached a peak in the mid-1930s, artists were simultaneously reviving native traditions in modern terms and working with a renewed concern for place, memory, history, and particularity.Alan Bennett recalls in the film how he discovered Ravilious through a reproduction Train Landscape in a school classroom in the mid-1940s. The watercolour painting formed part of a series of 'Chalk Figures' completed after his last one-man show in the spring of 1939, and although never formally exhibited, the Leicester Galleries in London arranged for the sale of three of them into public collections. Cashel's life begins in County Cork, Ireland. He lives with his aunt who works for the local landowner. Later when he and his aunt move to England he gradually comes to understand that his upbringing wasn't quite what he thought and this prompts him to leave home early and join the army. From here his life is a series of non-stop adventures: he is a soldier in Waterloo and India, a farmer in the US, a smuggler in Trieste, an explorer in East Africa, a prisoner in the Marshalsea in London, a writer who befriends Byron and Shelley. He is a man who follows his gut instinct wherever it takes him and who never gets over his first great love. At times I thought things were going to take a different direction and if anything it highlights the way that impulsive decisions shape your life and that there are always multiple ways that things could unspool.