Rosemary Hill

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Quotes

Pugin gave Britain's capital cities two of their greatest landmarks, the clock tower of the Palace of Westminster, generally, if inaccurately, known as BigBen,¹ and, in Edinburgh, the spire of Tollbooth St Johns's. He built the first English cathedral since Wren's St Paul's and he reinvented the family house. But his influence depended not only, not even primarily, on his buildings, it was both wide and more elusive. He gave the nineteenth century a new idea about what architecture could be and mean. He saw it as moral force in society and as a romantic art. (p. 1)
1. It is in fact the bell that is called Big Ben. (p. 536)
- God's Architect: Pugin and the Building of Romantic Britain. Yale University Press. 2008. p. 1. ISBN 9780300155754. (617 pages; 1st edition 2007)

The first detailed depiction of Stonehenge to survive is a watercolour, now in the British Museum, by Lucas de Heere. De Heere was a Flemish artist who lived in London from 1567 to 1577 and seems to have made another, less distinguished, contribution to the subject by carving his name on sarsen 53. Meanwhile, despite doubts about its reliability, The History of the Kings of Britain, remained popular and its account of Stonehenge was repeated by other authors. Only with the Renaissance, the revival of classical scholarship and the dawn of the New Learning towards the end of the fifteenth century, did it begin to fall out favour, for the nature of history writing itself was changing.
- Stonehenge. Wonders of the world. Harvard University Press. 2008. pp. 23 & 25. ISBN 9780674031326. (242 pages)

A difficulty for Hill is that many of the antiquaries she celebrates will be no more than names to most readers. But she combats this by selecting details that bring them to life. Eustache-Hyacinthe Langlois, for example, co-founder of the Rouen Museum of Antiquities, lived in picturesque squalor in an abandoned convent with an alcoholic wife and children who ran wild among the ruins. He eked out a living as a commercial artist and taught drawing to, among others, Gustave Flaubert, whose portrait he drew.
...
Hill is a magnificent historian and commands a vast range of sources. Her great strength, as she showed in her witty book on Stonehenge, is that she is not inclined just to laugh at what seem ludicrous beliefs. Rather, she carefully unpicks them, showing what made them attractive to their cultures. Time’s Witness is a book to change the way you think about history.
- John Carey, (13 June 2021) "Time’s Witness by Rosemary Hill, review — the craze for antiquity. A magnificent historian on the age of romanticism that inspired artists and was a goldmine for swindlers". The Sunday Times.