“dogs! or Men! (for I flatter you in saying That ye are dogs—your betters far)” —“Don Juan,” Canto VII. Verses 1–2 In August, Geoffrey Bond released the full-color coffee table book, Lord Byron’s Best Friends: From Bulldogs to Boatswain & Beyond. Bond, both a Byron and Newfoundland enthusiast, currently resides… read more
Books + Manuscripts
Six Degrees of Separation: “True Detective” and the Ransom Center
I am already missing Rust Cohle, Marty Hart, and sinister references to the “Yellow King.” If you are not sure what I am talking about, it’s the first season of the HBO crime series True Detective. A ritualistic murder investigation set against a backdrop of oil refineries in the swamps… read more
Correspondence sheds light on illustrations for articles by landscape design critic Mariana Van Rensselaer
Biographer Judith Major’s recent book Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer: A Landscape Critic in the Gilded Age (University of Virginia Press) highlights the work of the pioneering landscape critic, and Major quotes from one of the letters in the Ransom Center’s Elizabeth and Joseph Pennell papers for her book. Joseph Pennell… read more