As to the way that it has influenced my life, it was one of the reasons (the other was Ernst Gombrich’s book on Aby Warburg) why I applied to do postgraduate research at the Warburg Institute, where Baxandall taught. He supervised my PhD thesis on Castle Howard, slightly unwillingly because 18th-century architectural history was outside his academic field, but I would like to think to its benefit by his tacit encouragement to break away from the standard conventions of architectural history and his tolerance of the length of time which such research requires.Do you recommend it or is it a private passion? Yes, I’d recommend it. I still regard him as one of the great and slightly under-recognised heroes of British academic life and his book as a model of succinct intellectual analysis.! Charles Saumarez Smith is the Director of the National Portrait Gallery. His book ‘The Building of Castle Howard’ has recently been published by Pimlico at pounds 15. “GOD, BUT you’re lovely,” he breathed. Sindy smiled her brightest, emptiest smile and took in great gulps of the lush forest air.

It was so good to be free! That bitch Barbie could say what she liked about having finally kicked her rival off the shelf, but at least Sindy was free now Free of all those years of dolly celebrity. Free of the pink little life she’d made for herself with her “friend”, Paul Poor Paul. I must have read it in my first year of reading history of art. Why did it strike you so much? It’s short, quite dry and based on a series of undergraduate lectures which Baxandall gave to history students when he was a lecturer.

It is impossible now to appreciate what a revolution it represented in the study of history – away from tracing the development of broad styles in art and reconstructing the work of individual artists, to a willingness to treat paintings as evidence (in a non-Marxist way) of much larger issues in economic and social life. He is especially attentive to the ways in which contemporaries thought about and described their art, relating it to other aspects of their lives such as theology, dance and mathematics.
Have you re-read it? I read it again recently and was impressed by how well it has survived and the extent to which it is still able to provoke fresh thought about the activity of painting. When did you first read it? Scanning my bookshelves, which I sometimes feel represent the graveyard of a previous life, I can find plenty of books which have in one way or another deeply influenced my views of history and of art, but only this one qualifies in the literal sense as having changed my life. Not only does Isabel nudge Nancy’s children out of the way, take her place at table and steal her husband’s love, she also pushes Nancy over the edge into a terrible deed.The novel is neither melodramatic nor sentimental. All the characters are convincingly fleshed out, though Isabel necessarily remains enigmatic Nancy is drawn sympathetically, but not patronisingly. The narrative races along towards its shocking denouement, affording all the pleasures of a good thriller. Best of all, the novel is beautifully written, capturing physical experience in a wry poetry that is all Nancy’s own.

You don’t need to read the biographical background to enjoy this as a compelling work of art.. Life in the New Jersey countryside seems to bring Nancy the stability that has so far been denied her, until Isabel March arrives from Europe with the mission of saving the world and ruining Nancy’s life in the process. This is her life, after all, and this time around she is allowed to function at its centre Her tragedy is to be wobbled off-course by others. First, by her mother, whose cold indifference, amounting to cruelty and neglect, leaves her daughter crucially vulnerable, and secondly, by her selfish and inadequate father, who’s able to abuse his unprotected child safe in the knowledge that no one will believe her if she tells. The life of these rich people in Boston early this century sounds sad and grim. No wonder Nancy flees, as soon as she can, to New York City, where she camps out with her socialite cousin, falls in love, and escapes into marriage with her true love, a bohemian and impoverished would-be poet-publisher, Chance Brewster. The curious reader can consult both that account and Seymour’s brief note on it in her postscript to this novel.The difference, here, is that we swivel our gaze aside from the charismatic male poet and his Medea-like inamorata, to their hapless victim, as the fictionalised Nancy plays her part full stage.

Miranda Seymour’s new novel The Telling apes the form of memoir, in order subsequently to disclose that the particularly gruesome episodes she recounts actually have their roots in fact. Casting her tale as a novel lets her use her imagination to empathise with Nancy Brewster, the heroine- victim in the case. Listening to her story, as she writes it down for her grandchildren for whose understanding she yearns, the reader watches Nancy both make up her version of her life and simultaneously put herself back together again by piecing together the subjecthood which was torn from her and shredded.
In fact, Miranda Seymour has treated this story before, in her excellent biography of Robert Graves, who got tangled up, at a certain crucial moment in his career, with the poet-prophet Laura Riding, with far-reaching and damaging effects. At the same time we can be pleased by the invitation to relax into the armchair delights of form: let me tell you a story.