The seventeenth-century London Wenceslaus Hollar knew is now largely destroyed or buried. Yet its populous river, its timbered streets, fashionable ladies, old St Paul's, the devestation of the Fire, the palace of Whitehall and the meadows of Islington live on for us in his etchings.
Drawing on numerous sources, Gillian Tindall creates a montage of Hollar's life and times and of the illustrious lives that touched his. It is a carefully researched factual account, but she has also employed her novelist's skill to form an intricate whole - a life's texture which is also an absorbing and occasionally tragic story.
Gillian Tindall is a master of miniaturist history, well known for the quality of her writing and the scrupulousness of her research; she makes a handful of people, a few locations or a dramatic event stand for the much larger picture, as her seminal book The Fields Beneath, approached the history of Kentish Town, London. She has also written on London's Southbank (The House by the Thames), on southern English counties (Three Houses, Many Lives), and the Left Bank (Footprints in Paris), amongst other locations, as well as biography and prize-winning novels. Her latest book, The Tunnel through Time, traced the history of the Crossrail route, the forthcoming 'Elizabeth' line. She has lived in the same London house for over fifty years.
Title: The Man Who Drew London: Wenceslaus Hollar in Reality and Imagination
Author: Gillian Tindall
ISBN: 9780712667579
Binding:
Publisher: Vintage
Publication Date: 2003-08-07
Number of Pages: 256
Weight: 0.3811 kg
Her intention is that fact and fiction should complement each other. They do perfectly -- Frances Spalding * Sunday Times *
With clarity of purpose and clarity of style, she has written a book that is both elegant and thoughtful -- Michael Prodger * Sunday Telegraph *
Gillian Tindall is a tapestry maker. She finds patterns in history - woven from close research into people and places - that no one else would have the persistence and insight to pursue * Independent *
