The midlands

Wednesday

Richard Bratby

The melancholy genius of Joseph Wright of Derby

If you lived in the 1760s and were affluent enough – and curious enough – science could be a family affair. The instrument maker Benjamin Martin actually marketed scientific equipment for amateurs, complete with an instruction manual listing simple, edifying experiments for home enjoyment. And so in 1768, in ‘An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump’, Joseph Wright (1734-97) painted a group of family and friends attempting Experiment 42 in Martin’s manual. You’re sure to have seen it: a darkened room with a white bird wilting in a glass bulb while the faces of the participants – a magus-like scientist, a fashionable couple, a frightened little girl burying

Thursday

Claudia FitzHerbert

Mismatched from the start: One Day I Shall Astonish the World, by Nina Stibbe, reviewed

First the bad news: Nina Stibbe’s new novel does not feature Lizzie Vogel, the engaging narrator of the trilogy that made her name as a comic novelist after she’d first published some extremely funny letters written during her stint as a nanny in a north London household in the 1980s. Man at the Helm (2015) is the novel Dickens lacked the generosity to write, in which tribute is paid to the creative value of a chaotic childhood presided over by what the conventional world calls an unfit parent. The two which followed covered just a year of Lizzie’s teens and early twenties. The fact that our beady-eyed chronicler remains on