Ramsay, and it was love at first sight. A strange sort of love, given that it was "between a 70 year-old woman and a 30-year-old gay man, and was never going to be consummated physically", as Callow puts it succinctly. But love it was--an intense, passionate affair which lasted several years during which Ramsay showered Callow with gifts, spiritual and material, despite his continuing relationship with his Egyptian lover Aziz. Like creatures from a bygone era, Ramsay and Callow were bold, huge personalities; their almost daily letter writing filled with histrionic emotion and grandiose discoursing on Art and Life. Callow manages to turn the letters into an elegant, riveting narrative, exploring the complex triangle between himself, Ramsay and Aziz, Aziz's depression and eventual suicide, the affair's inevitable cooling off, and Ramsay's decline into dementia and eventual death with a remarkable lack of sentimentality. Reading the open-hearted love letters of an intensely private and at times vulnerable woman makes for uncomfortable reading, but there is no doubting Callow's love and tenderness for his irascible subject, nor the sincerity of his emotion for her, and his enduring respect and responsibility for her memory. (Running time 3 hours.) --Alan Stewart --This text refers to the hardback edition of this title.
Callow tells us how Shakespeare can change your love life in his charming personal selection of Shakespeare's various celebrations of love, in Shakespeare on Love. "If music be the food of love, play on," says the lovesick Orsino in Twelfth Night, and Callow provides plenty food for thought in his selections. In a short and pithy introduction he remarks that "in making the selection for this volume, I was struck by how widely the notion of love appears in Shakespeare's work, by no means solely confined to the amorous or the sexual sphere". As a result, interspersed among selections on "Falling in Love", "Love Gone Wrong", and "Love Embraced", we have "The Many Forms of Love", including love of a brother from Hamlet, love of children from Macbeth, and even love of dogs from The Two Gentlemen of Verona. The selections are also supplemented by Callow's wonderfully portentous thoughts on particular passages and characters, and the whole volume is illustrated with other 50 thoughtfully chosen Renaissance and Pre-Raphaelite paintings. --Lucy Snowe
Callow tells us how Shakespeare can change your love life in his charming personal selection of Shakespeare's various celebrations of love, in Shakespeare on Love. "If music be the food of love, play on," says the lovesick Orsino in Twelfth Night, and Callow provides plenty food for thought in his selections. In a short and pithy introduction he remarks that "in making the selection for this volume, I was struck by how widely the notion of love appears in Shakespeare's work, by no means solely confined to the amorous or the sexual sphere". As a result, interspersed among selections on "Falling in Love", "Love Gone Wrong", and "Love Embraced", we have "The Many Forms of Love", including love of a brother from Hamlet, love of children from Macbeth, and even love of dogs from The Two Gentlemen of Verona. The selections are also supplemented by Callow's wonderfully portentous thoughts on particular passages and characters, and the whole volume is illustrated with other 50 thoughtfully chosen Renaissance and Pre-Raphaelite paintings. --Lucy Snowe
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19.08.2005
23.08.2005
