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Treasure Palaces

Great Writers Visit Great Museums

Contributors

Edited by Maggie Fergusson

By The Economist

Foreword by Nicholas Serota

Formats and Prices

Price

$16.99

Price

$22.49 CAD

Format

Trade Paperback

Format:

Trade Paperback $16.99 $22.49 CAD

This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around November 8, 2016. This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.

In this exuberant celebration of the world’s museums, great and small, revered writers like Ann Patchett, Julian Barnes, Ali Smith, and more tell us about their favorite museums, including the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York, the Mus’e Rodin in Paris, and the Prado in Madrid. These essays, collected from the pages of The Economist’s Intelligent Life magazine, reveal the special hold that some museums have over us all.

Acclaimed novelist William Boyd visits the Leopold Museum in Vienna — a shrine to his favorite artist, Egon Schiele, whom Boyd first discovered on a postcard as a University student. In front of her favorite Rodins, Allison Pearson recalls a traumatic episode she suffered at the hands of a schoolteacher following a trip to the Mus’e in Paris. Neil Gaiman admires the fantastic world depicted in British outsider artist Richard Dadd’s “The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke,” a tiny painting that also decorated the foldout cover of a Queen album, housed in the Victorian room of Tate Britain’s Pre-Raphaelite collection. Ann Patchett fondly revisits Harvard University’s Museum of Natural History — which she discovered at 19, while in the throes of summer romance with a biology student named Jack.

Treasure Palaces is a treasure trove of wonders, a tribute to the diversity and power of the museums, the safe-keepers of our world’s most extraordinary artifacts, and an intimate look into the deeply personal reveries we fall into when before great art.

  • “Anyone who appreciates fine writing will treasure this literary memory palace.” –Booklist

    “An entertaining and idiosyncratic tour of obscure museums that have inspired and challenged famous authors throughout their lives…The collection takes an intimate look both at the writers and the museums themselves, providing deep insights into how artists connect with the world around them.” –Publishers Weekly

    “Lively…These graceful, vicarious tours to museums famous and obscure are almost as good as the real thing.” —Kirkus Reviews

On Sale
Nov 8, 2016
Page Count
240 pages
Publisher
The Economist
ISBN-13
9781610396806

The Economist

About the Author

John Tennent is a coauthor of The Economist Guide to Business Modelling and The Economist Guide to Cash Management. He is an accountant, who for the past twenty years has been involved in training and consultancy with firms such as Unilever, BOC, BAE, Kraft, Thomson Corp, Cable & Wireless, BT, St Gobain, and EMI.

Learn more about this author