d r i n k s t e r: PRUNING IN RENNAISSANCE FRANCE

“Sod the wine, I want to suck on the writing. This man White is an instinctive writer, bloody rare to find one who actually pulls it off, as in still gets a meaning across with concision. Sharp arbitrage of speed and risk, closest thing I can think of to Cicero’s ‘motus continuum animi.’

Probably takes a drink or two to connect like that: he literally paints his senses on the page.”

DBC Pierre (Vernon God Little, Ludmila’s Broken English, Lights Out In Wonderland ... Winner: Booker prize; Whitbread prize; Bollinger Wodehouse Everyman prize; James Joyce Award from the Literary & Historical Society of University College Dublin)

02 March 2014

PRUNING IN RENNAISSANCE FRANCE

March is pruning time in the northern hemisphere, as best portrayed here in Les Grandes Heures d'Anne de Bretagne, a book of hours commissioned by Anne of Britanny, Queen of France, and illuminated by Jean Bourdichon between 1503 and 1508. Anne (25 January 1477 – 9 January 1514) married two kings consecutively, Maximilien I of Austria and Charles III of France. She was the richest woman in Europe. This remarkable book is held in the Bibliothèque nationale de France as Ms lat. 9474. If you manage to lift it, sneak it through the back door and I'll meet you just across Rue des Petits Champs, in Willi's. As long as you let me fondle your prize for an hour or two, the Cognac's on me. In the meantime, happy pruning, and good luck with 2014, Old Yurp!