Kirjahaku

For nearly half a century, Sir Roy Strong has enjoyed a high public profile in the arts world in Britain. Yet remarkably little is known about his life before the Swinging Sixties when he burst upon the scene as the revolutionary trendy young director of the National Portrait Gallery, aged thirty-one. In this book he recounts for the first time the story of his social origins and the roots of his life-long passion for the culture and history of England. He describes his childhood home in a suburban North London terrace, revealing himself to have been a shy solitary child of melancholy temperament, painting Elizabethan miniatures and Shakespearean set designs in his teens. It follows him through grammar school and university, where together with a generation of postwar ‘meritocrats’ like A.S. Byatt and Alan Bennett, his passion for learning was awakened and nourished. We catch glimpses of seminal experiences, such as his first outings to the theatre, opera and ballet, and his first trip abroad to Italy, which was to have a lasting influence on his sensibilities. He explores key, sometimes painful relationships with his family, his school teacher with whom he had a lifelong correspondence, and his debt to such people as C.V. Wedgwood, A.L. Rowse, Frances Yates and Cecil Beaton. In it we glimpse a vanished world dominated by class and hierarchy up which he climbed. As a backdrop we have the transformation of London from the drab, postwar world of the 1950s to the epicentre of fashion in the 1960s, and the development of Sir Roy’s distinctive sartorial style, inspired by the burgeoning shops on Carnaby Street. Richly illustrated with drawings, letters, photographs and other archival material, this is an honest and compelling portrait of a young man about to step into the limelight of the British cultural scene he helped to modernize and in which he played a leading role.

The definitive history of coronations and the Royal Family, from acclaimed writer Roy Strong. ’What is the finest sight in the world? A Coronation.What do people talk most about? A Coronation.What is delightful to have passed? A Coronation.’Horace Walpole, 1761 As a boy of sixteen, Roy Strong watched the grand procession carrying Queen Elizabeth II to her coronation. The spectacle was considered the greatest public event of the century. But now, so many years later, many people have little notion of what a coronation is and are unaware of the rich resonances of the ritual, or its deep significance in terms of the committal of monarch to people. This book is the first of its kind – a comprehensive history that sets each coronation into its political, social, religious and cultural context. The story is one of constant re-invention as the service has had to respond to all the changes in fortune of the monarchy or the country: everything from legitimising usurpers to reconciling a Catholic rite to the tenets of Protestantism. It even had to be recreated from scratch after the Restoration of Charles II in 1660. In this way, Strong tells the story of the British monarchy since the tenth century, and looks forward to the coronation of King Charles III. The musical history alone is one of extraordinary richness – involving Henry Purcell, Handel, Edward Elgar, William Walton – plus the celebratory poetry, the art and the spectacular engravings published at coronations are all explored, as is the more recent role of photographers. The book particularly concentrates on post-1603 developments, including the incredible story of the Stuarts, when the crown jewels used for hundreds of years at coronations were melted down as symbols of the hated Divine Right of Kings. As Charles III succeeds to the throne and preparations are made for his coronation, Strong speculates as to the revisions now called for to its ritual and pageantry to meet the changes in the role of the monarchy in the twenty-first century.

The new paperback edition of Roy Strong's popular introduction to Elizabethan portraiture Written for the general reader, Roy Strong’s popular introduction to Elizabethan portraiture synthesizes scholarship and research on this subject into a concise introduction to the Elizabethan aesthetic. Strong surveysthe entirety of Elizabeth I’s reign from the Procession Picture to the Rainbow Portrait (1600–1602). A range of social aspects of Elizabethan portraiture are explored, such as patronage, symbolic self-fashioning, Elizabethan pageantry and melancholic humor. Strong reveals the Elizabethan approach to portraiture, while demonstrating a new way to look at these paintings. From celebrated portraits of the Queen and paintings of knights and courtiers, to works depicting an aspiring 'middle class’, Strong presents a detailed and authoritative examination of one of the most fascinating periods of British art.

Shakespeare's potent use of garden imagery has captivated successive generations of readers and inspired the making of gardens across the globe. Laced with quotations and abounding with illustrations drawn from sources including Elizabethan gardening books, embroidered fabrics and hand-coloured herbals, The Quest for Shakespeare's Garden tells the story of the Bard's own garden at New Place in Stratford-upon-Avon, revealing its place in garden history.

A work of great learning and skilful synthesis, beautifully illustrated. SUNDAY TIMES The spectacular festivals mounted by the princes of the Renaissance were both a marriage of the arts and a complex and subtle expression of political theory. From the Renaissance festivals ballet, opera and even the proscenium arch theatre are derived. Festivals are therefore a vital part of European cultural history. Here Roy Strong provides a guide to theirorigins and purpose, and their lasting influence.

Every student of English history will enjoy this story, which is delightfully easy to read and remarkable for its insights into the deepest consequences of individual actions.The Story of Britain is an accessible one-volume history that clearly depict Britain's origins-and explain how the past shaped the nation's current identity. He begins the story of Britain from the very earliest recorded Celtic times, and with this new edition has now brought it up to date via the Blair years and into the present day of Brexit Britain.A magnificently eloquent volume, the narrative chronicles two thousand years of Britain's history, the triumph of its people, the glory of its culture, and its dramatic influence on other nations of the world, especially the United States. It is a remarkable achievement and, with his passion, enthusiasm and wide-ranging knowledge, Strong is the ideal narrator. The book is ideally suited for everyone who cares about Britain's past.

Based on a lifetime's work in the field, Sir Roy Strong offers an expert and engaging new look at portrait painting in Stuart England, studying the sitters as much as the artists. Sir Roy Strong has been writing for over half a century on the painters of the courts of James I and Charles I. While taking account of the mass of scholarly work that has appeared during that time, this book offers a very different approach to the subject. Until now, the universal method has been to look at the artists, in particular van Dyck, and to see half a century of painting through the six years when the latter was in England. Instead, we are offered a view based on portraits and their sitters, and particularly on the dramatic change in their attitudes, from the still medieval (if Protestant) aesthetic of the Elizabethan age to the ambiguity of one which replaced that aesthetic by one based on the Catholic baroque of European art. Portraits after all are permanent records of how a sitter wished to be seen by posterity as well as in his or her own period. The obsession with the painter and with attribution has tended to obscure that very basic fact. They are inevitably self-fashioning images that chart the new mythology not only of a new dynasty, the Stuarts, but also of a burgeoning and assertive aristocracy. Unlike their spectacular court masques, however, which were gone in an evening of glory, the portraits are still with us - or, rather, those that have survived. Through them we are able to trace a new iconography for a new dynasty and also an aesthetic revolution which moved away from the Elizabethan world of ambiguity and hieroglyphs to one set in space defined by the new optics of the Renaissance. But the title, The Stuart Image, is designed to emphasise that above all what we see is the image and not the reality.

Beautifully illustrated narrative history of the English country church In his engaging account, Sir Roy Strong celebrates the life of the English parish churchFrom the arrival of the missionaries from Ireland and Rome, to the beautiful architecture and rich spirituality of medieval Catholicism; from the cataclysm of the Reformation, to the gentrified cleric we meet in Jane Austen novels, Roy Strong takes us on a journey - historical, social and spiritual - to explore what men and women experienced through the age when they went to church on Sunday.‘Anyone with the slightest interest in the English parish church, of its life today, or its history will be intrigued, informed and enchanted by this lucid, and occasionally provocative, account’ Country Life