In this week’s TLS – a note from the History editor

Not too long ago, the cartoonist’s joke shown on this week’s front cover would
have been a familiar one. Here is the “Concert of Europe”, making a filthy
racket, as the Great European Powers attempt to find harmony in the
political settlement that followed the Congress of Vienna. By the time the
Italian artist was working in 1913, this balance had lasted, after a
fashion, for almost 100 years, but was, of course, about to be shattered for
ever. Niall Ferguson welcomes a book on Europe that reassesses such
unfashionable matters as diplomatic history and the relations between great
powers. Brendan Simms, he writes, is “challenging a set of assumptions about
history that came to dominate the academic world in the generation after A.
J. P. Taylor’s”, and he does so in pithy, controversial style that bears
comparison with the master.

In a focus on the Performing Arts this week, our reviewers discuss two
examples of wholesale reinterpretations of classics. Peter Brook has spent
decades restaging Shakespeare, taking his inspiration from sources as
diverse as Norse myth, Kabuki, the Chinese Circus, and painters such as
Breugel, Bosch and Watteau. His Reflections on Shakespeare, John Stokes
finds, show that at the age of eighty-eight, Brook is still thinking
unconventionally about the Bard. At Glyndebourne, the modern operatic
convention of bizarre staging is firmy adhered to, with Rameau’s stately
measures being sung from the interior of a kitchen appliance. Guy Dammann
takes this “designer-garish” setting in his stride, and finds it “faithful
to the baroque spirit”.

In Arts, Frank Whitford discusses the “most popular painter in Britain” (apart
from Rolf Harris), and argues that, contrary to received wisdom, L.
S. Lowry was no amateur “Sunday painter” (he studied for two decades at
Manchester and Salford) and he often strayed from his “home territory”. Nor
was he “neglected”: he was an official war artist and artist at the
Coronation, as well as a Royal Academician. He was also offered a
knighthood. But was he any good?

David Horspool