READING DELIGHTS

Events with books

Here is a selection of books that are taking centre stage at The Bath Festival from 17–24 May. From Napoleon and Elizabeth Barrett Browning to palliative care and teenage memoir, go along (booking advised), and consider your next read

Breathtaking: Inside the NHS in a time of pandemic by Dr Rachel Clarke

Sat 22 May, 11am Bath Forum Rachel Clarke is a bestselling author (Dear Life: A Doctor’s Story of Love, Loss and Consolation), health campaigner and palliative care doctor. Her new book Breathtaking is an unflinching insider’s account of medicine in the time of coronavirus. Rachel talks to Max Porter about how it feels to confront a pandemic from the inside, witnessing death on an unprecedented scale, coping with the uncertainty of whether your protective equipment is up to the job and dealing with the inadequacies of the government response. But, amid all the tough questions, this event will also consider the courage of patients and NHS staff alike, people who rose to their best upon facing the worst. This is a searing account and one critical for our times. For this event, Bath Festivals are offering a 10% discount for NHS workers.

Little Brown, £16.99

Napoleon: A Life in Gardens and Shadows by Ruth Scurr

Thurs 20 May, 5pm, Assembly Rooms Historian, award-winning biographer and literary critic Ruth Scurr’s new book is a revelatory portrait of Napoleon, written to mark the 200th anniversary of his death, showing him as both an emperor hunting for glory and an old man in a straw hat, leaning on his spade.

Ruth talks to Caroline Sanderson about Napoleon’s love of nature and the gardens which gave his revolutionary life its light and shade, Napoleon’s gardens range from his childhood olive groves in Corsica, to Josephine’s gardens and menageries in Paris, to the walled garden of Hougoumont at the battle of Waterloo, and ultimately to his final garden in exile on St Helena. Come and gain fascinating insight into the domineering world leader’s peaceful pastime. Chatto &

Windus, £30 A Net For Small Fishes

by Lucy Jago, Thurs 20 May, 10.30am, Assembly Rooms A Net for Small Fishes is historical fiction at its most lavish, based on a real-life scandal involving Frances Howard, wife of the powerful Earl of Essex and Anne Turner, her dresser, which rocked the Jacobean court. It’s a novel about power, sexuality and female friendship, about #MeToo four centuries ago. Former TV producer and awardwinning biographer Lucy Jago talks to Caroline Sanderson about the gender politics of the 1600s, the fashion for cross-dressing, wearing one’s wealth, divorce among the aristocracy, the devilment of women, necromancers, perfumes and poisons. “Sumptuous … If you’re feeling bereft after finishing The Mirror and the Light, let Jago transport you back to the Jacobean court” The Telegraph.

Bloomsbury Publishing, £16.99

Two Way Mirror: The Life of Elizabeth

Barrett Browning by Fiona Sampson, Sun 23 May, 1pm, Assembly Rooms Most of us know so little about the woman acclaimed as Britain’s greatest female poet. Yet she topped a BBC poll to find the nation’s favourite poem, How do I love thee? Let me count the ways, No.43 Songs from the Portuguese. Fiona Sampson, award-winning poet, broadcaster, critic and author of Two-Way Mirror: The Life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, takes us behind the romance of her extraordinary life to show a thoroughly modern figure, who remains an electrifying study in self-invention.

Elizabeth was born in 1806, a time when women could neither attend university nor vote, and yet she achieved lasting literary fame, inspiring writers from Emily Dickinson to George Eliot and Virginia Woolf. She gained notoriety after going against her despotic father’s wishes and running away to secretly marry fellow poet Robert Browning. This event will hold up a mirror to the woman, her art and the art of biography itself. The event is sponsored by Kingswood School. Viking,

£18.99

Sometimes in Bath by Charles Nevin, 22 May, 2pm, Assembly Rooms Join award-winning journalist, columnist and author Charles Nevin as he takes us on a captivating story-tour though our elegant and intriguing city. All the Bath characters through the years are there. Beau Nash, Old King Bladud, a young Horatio Nelson, Jane Austen’s Mr Bennet, the Emperor Haile Selassie and many more personalities come to life in stories that chart the history of Britain’s oldest resort and premier purveyor of health, happiness and romance.

The Roman city of Aquae Sulis, known today as the city of Bath, was once the shrine of Sulis Minerva. Sulis, the Celtic goddess of healing and sacred water, was conflated with the Roman goddess, Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, which led to the city’s Roman name. The urban settlement of Aquae Sulis emerged in the first few decades of Roman Britain and was home to the only hot spring in the British Isles. For the next 400 years, the spring-fed baths and the temple were in constant use by locals and visitors alike. However, less than a century after the collapse of the Roman empire, the city was in ruin.

Early discoveries

Fast forward to 1727. A group of workers discovered a gilded bronze head of Minerva while digging a sewer trench along Stall Street. This discovery kickstarted what has been coined the “threehundred-year dig”, with archaeologists working tirelessly to uncover and understand the city that lay deep beneath our own.

In 1980, Peter Davenport was brought to Bath by his professor, Barry Cunliffe. Cunliffe was Professor of European Prehistory at Oxford and director of the Bath Archaeological Trust. In 1985, Davenport and Cunliffe wrote a book about their work excavating the temple precinct lying beneath the Pump Room and exploring the nearby sacred spring. Together they published the spectacular results in their book The Temple of Sulis Minerva at Bath (1985). In the near 40 years following the temple excavation, Davenport has continued to play an active role in the archaeology of Bath and worked as the senior archaeologist at Bath Archaeological Trust up until its closure in 2005. “We did just about every excavation in Bath in that period,” he says.

During Davenport’s career, a great deal has come to light, leading to new interpretations of how the Romans once lived. Cunliffe made his work and some later finds more available to the general reader and published the third edition of Roman Bath Discovered in 2000. Since then, however, several important excavations have taken place, along with some re-evaluation of older work, meaning an updated report was very much needed.

New publication re-evaluating the findings

This brings us to 2021. Davenport – now a semi-retired archaeologist – is set to publish his latest book, Roman Bath: A New History and Archaeology of Aquae Sulis, this month. He refers to the publication as the “latest interim report” in the “three-hundredyear dig”, a phrase originally coined by the manager of the Roman Baths and Pump Room, Stephen Clews, highlighting the fact that the discovery is a continuous process – one which will never be completed. “Archaeology is one of those things that goes out of date very quickly,” says Davenport. “But it continues to shape our ideas.”

Throughout Roman Bath, Davenport eloquently tells the story of the town of Aquae Sulis and unpacks a series of new and surprising discoveries that have been made over the last forty years. He documents the most recent discoveries on Walcot Street and details the revelation that the Roman city where people worked, shopped and lived did not actually surround the baths, as previously thought. “The centre of Roman Bath was a monumental religious centre, full of grand buildings. The town where people lived was further out,” explains Davenport. “I think that completely changed our understanding of what Roman Bath had been like.”

Throughout this gripping read, Davenport details a whole host of astonishing discoveries from the last four decades. One notable study was conducted on the paving surrounding the Roman Baths themselves. Archaeologists realised that despite many millions of people entering the baths over the last 100 years – on average 1.3 million people a year – there has been little to no wear, only polish from people’s shoes. The paving, however, is heavily worn. As the Romans would have been barefoot while using the baths, this heavy wear indicates that the damage must have been caused after the collapse of the empire when people were walking around in heavy outdoor boots. “It’s another little hint that the Roman Baths were not being used as baths but were still in use for something else,” says Davenport. “There was still activity going on. We’re talking about the end of Roman Britain, we’re not talking about a desert with no people. There’s just a change, the Romans have gone, the administration has changed, the economy might have collapsed but people are still living. The end of Roman Britain is a fascinating period because we know so little about it. We have a few odd historical references and we know certain things happened but we don’t really understand the process. Archaeology is probably the only way we’re going to get it.”

The last 30 years: technological insights

The last 30 years, in particular, have seen an influx in new discoveries and updated information for many reasons, including the evolution of technology, the introduction of new techniques, and the change in planning regulations. Since the 1990s, there has been some sort of archaeological investigation almost every year. Just recently, on Bathwick Street, substantial Roman buildings and streets were discovered in an excavation under a new block of flats.

“Much to everyone’s surprise, they found archaeology dating from quite early on in the Roman period. That was an area where we didn’t think that there would be what you might call ‘town’ and this was ‘town’,” says Davenport. “There's been a lot of work, not just in Britain but especially in Britain, in the last 30 years since the planning regulations changed in 1990. Excavation techniques are getting better, we’re still discovering new dating techniques and especially new technology,” he adds. “For example, up until 10–15 years ago it was sort of a guess as to what pottery was being used for. Now there’s technology which tells us what was being cooked or used in these pots because it leaves molecular traces in the fabric of the pottery. You can actually study it and say ‘well, they were boiling cabbage, they were cooking lamb’ – it’s quite astonishing.”

With technology granting a more enhanced excavation and the safe digital storing of records, archaeologists have been able to question and revise the theories that have been suggested over the last three centuries. Davenport’s Roman Bath gives an extraordinary narration of the growth of our understanding; pays tribute to the many who have long laboured in severe conditions to explore and rescue the lost secrets of the ancient world; and poignantly passes on the torch to the next generation, who will undoubtedly further our knowledge of the Roman city buried beneath our feet. Ultimately, Davenport’s Roman Bath is a fascinating read packed full of remarkable revelations.

The end of Roman Britain is a fascinating period because we know so little about it. Archaeology is probably the only way we’re going to get it ❝

Roman Bath; The History Press Ltd; set for publication in May. Available to buy from the Roman Baths Museum and available online.

Peter Davenport wrote his last book Medieval Bath Uncovered in 2002. The book follows the reconstruction of the city around its convent and monastery and, later, its abbey.

Musing on museums

Art historian and former director of the National Portrait Gallery Charles Saumarez Smith has written a fascinating book which explores the art museums of the world and is speaking in Bath on 19 May

While our public galleries and museums have been closed during the pandemic, we’ve had plenty of time to reflect on our past experiences of viewing great works of art and on our intellectual and emotional response to art and to the buildings it is housed in. Consider for example, that the impact of the dramatic glass pyramid at the Louvre in Paris installed in the 1980s has on visitors may stay in their memories, just as much as perhaps as their first sight of the Mona Lisa, which is housed within its historic galleries.

Being on the cusp of the re-opening of art museums in England (on 17 May) provides a good opportunity to consider how museums have changed over the past 100 years. And to speculate what future lies ahead for them.

Charles Saumarez Smith is well placed to give a global overview of art museums, which he shares in The Art Museum in Modern Times, his very personal view of 42 museums from London to New York and from Margate to Shanghai. He has been a director of the National Portrait Gallery and of the National Gallery, chief executive of the Royal Academy of Arts and an educator in the field of the history of design. His book was published in March, but conceived long before the world pandemic.

The Art Museum traces a radical shift over a century. Then art museums were housed in largely classically influenced buildings which set out to educate and instruct its visitors. At that time in the 1930s a new, bold approach to designing art museums saw more focus on creating buildings to display not just art from the past, but from the present.

Saumarez Smith’s journey around the world showcases individual museums and their development. His chapter on museums for the millennium includes a section dedicated to the creation of Tate Modern – a disused power station beside the Thames – at the turn of the century. He quotes the philosophy of Nicholas Serota, then recently appointed director of the Tate Gallery, who believed: “our aim must be to generate a condition in which visitors can experience a sense of discovery in looking at particular paintings, sculptures or installations in a particular room at a particular moment, rather than find themselves standing on a conveyor belt of history.”

Three important aspects of re-purposing the old power station into an international gallery for contemporary art were its impact on its rundown neighbourhood, the introduction of attractive parkland around it and the public spaces inside which would allow visitors room to circulate. No one could argue with the fact that the vast cavern of the Turbine Hall makes a dramatic space, and provides a setting for memorably huge installations, such as the great bronze spiders of Louise Bourgeois in 2000, or Ai Weiwei’s millions of tiny handcrafted porcelain Sunflower Seeds in 2010.

As Saumarez Smith contemplates the key issues facing art museums he looks at how they might attract and engage new visitors, how they might get a greater diversity of visitors and make them more friendly for children, less elite and less hidebound. He also looks at museums as somewhere visitors can go to reflect, offering a place to retreat, to enlarge the human faculties through visual as well as cognitive experience. It is a paradox that we want our modern museums to be both marketplaces, with coffee and shops, while at the same time we expect them to be quiet cathedrals of contemplation. He also observes of the modern audience: “They do not want to be told what to think.”

Chris Stephens, director of the Holburne Museum, which this year marks the 10th anniversary of its extension, commented: “Charles Saumarez Smith’s new book explores the development of the modern art museum, starting with the Museum of Modern Art that opened in New York in 1939 and culminating with the efflorescence of new structures in China and the UEA, taking in the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Getty Center in Los Angeles, Tate Modern in London and many others on the way. Among those larger, international stars he also mentions some of the smaller institutions that were part of the slew of new and refurbished museums that followed the introduction of the National Lottery in the UK. The book’s timing is fitting as several of them celebrate their 10th anniversary, including The Hepworth Wakefield and Turner Contemporary in Margate, just as the Holburne celebrates 10 years of its redevelopment.

He charts the move from the museum as a place of teaching to one of aesthetic contemplation. The period has also, however, been marked by the increasing opening up of museums to as wide an audience as possible. The Victorians believed in the value of art and museums for individual and social wellbeing, as we do now, but they built grand structures, usually Palladian, which were approached up majestic flights of stairs to emphasise the importance of what lay within and to impress upon the visitor the privilege of the experience they were about to enjoy.

The contrasting attitude now is best captured by the entrance to Tate Modern where the grand stairs have been replaced by a ramp which allows visitors to flow seamlessly from pavement to gallery. “It is a great journey from a world where access to art was a privilege to one where all of us working in museums seek to make creativity available to everyone without exception.” n

Charles Saumaraz Smith will be in conversation with Chris Stephens, director of the Holburne Museum, Bath as part of The Bath Festival, on 19 May at 10.30am at the Assembly Rooms. Tickets from: thebathfestival.org.uk; 01225 463362. Chris Stephens is director of the Holburne Museum, Bath. He was curator of Modern British Art at Tate Britain from 2001–2017. The Art Museum in Modern Times by Charles Saumarez Smith, is published by Thames and Hudson.