Culture

One of the oddest of Bloomsbury’s event venues must be the Foundling Museum. The handsome building on Coram’s Fields houses what remains of the London Foundling Hospital, which opened on the site in 1745. Its imposing rooms are lined with oil portraits of past patrons and among the artefacts on display is the original score of George Frideric Handel’s fundraising The Messiah, which he donated to the hospital. In the 18th century the Foundling Hospital was a fashionable cause, and the great and good flocked to associate with its charitable works. But some of the museum’s cases tell another story — the history not of great names but of the anonymous children of the desperate poor.

In 2010, Adam Sisman published a masterly biography of Hugh Trevor-Roper, who was not merely one of the best historians of his generation but also a former intelligence officer, fascinated by tricks, lies and fraud. He himself wrote a mischievous series of anonymous articles for The Spectator, purporting to emanate from the 17th-century pen of ‘Mercurius Oxoniensis’,which gave a hilarious picture of his contemporary dons at Oxford and their crazy ways. One of his funniest books was an exposé of the sinologist Sir Edmund Backhouse, a benefactor of the Bodleian Library, whom Trevor-Roper proved to have been a forger and liar on a heroic scale.

Was the Bauhaus the most inspired art school of all time or the malignant source of an uglifying industrial culture which has defiled our cities? Two books look at its influence abroad after 1933 when the Nazis put the jackboot in. The Bauhaus was nothing if not modern — even if ‘modern’ is now a historical style label and the Bauhauslers were as trapped in their historical circumstances as we are in our own. This was noticed and ridiculed by Tom Wolfe in his 1981 squib, From Bauhaus to Our House, a book as bristling with cheerful spite as with clever wordplay. Although not quite so simple, the Bauhaus was dedicated to the idea that the prospects for all mankind could be determined by engineering and metaphors of engineering.

Like many a 20th-century publishing house, the fine old firm of Faber & Faber came about almost by accident. The inaugurating Faber — Geoffrey — was an All Souls don in search of a livelihood, who began his career in the post-Great War book trade by investing in the Scientific Press, publishers of the Nursing Mirror. There was trouble with the Gwyer family, owners of the original concern, who resisted the move into general books and disliked the poems of Faber’s brisk young protégé Mr Eliot, but by 1929 the sale of the Mirror for an eye-watering £190,000 (about £5 million at current values), allowed Geoffrey to buy them out and set up on his own.

    IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE PRINCIPAL PARTNERS OF SHAKESPEARE’S GLOBE’S 2019 SUMMER SEASON As I noted last week, the dramatic climax of Henry IV, Part Two — that stew of rot and renewal — is reached when Prince Hal casts off the roguish companion of his younger years, ‘the tutor and the feeder of my riots’, Sir John Falstaff, on the way to his coronation in the final act. Falstaff is a parodic king, an anti-king. That is what gives much of the dramatic electricity to the clowning scenes in Part One where Falstaff play-acts King Henry. The King embodies the rule of law; and Falstaff holds it in contempt. The King embodies honour; and Falstaff delivers a celebrated soliloquy in which he mocks it as ‘a mere scutcheon’.

Timothy Hyde’s Ugliness and Judgment: On Architecture in the Public Eye is not about why we find things ugly. It’s not even about what ugliness is, or why our understanding of what it is see-saws so violently. We don’t learn why people once loathed John Nash’s All Souls at Langham Place, one MP calling it ‘a horrible object’, or what insanity led Edwin Lutyens to condemn — as ‘an ugly angle’ — roofs slanted at 45 degrees. The mud-slinging doesn’t interest Hyde. How the slung mud shapes us excites him much more. Arguments over ugliness, he contends, are never just about aesthetics. They’re a proxy for social, political, even theological, concerns.