Treasure Palaces

In this exuberant celebration of the world's museums, great and small, revered writers like Ann Patchett, Julian Barnes, Neil Gaiman, and more tell us about their favorite museums, including the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York, the Musée Rodin in Paris, and Tate Modern in London. These essays, collected from the pages of The Economist's Intelligent Life magazine, reveal the special hold that some museums have over us all. In his ode to the Museum of Anthropology in Xalapa, Mexico, the great novelist and essayist Carlos Fuentes writes, “Museums, like lovers, can lose their charms. But the next time can always be the first time.” William Boyd visits the Leopold Museum in Vienna—a shrine to his favorite artist, Egon Schiele, whom Boyd first discovered on a postcard as a University student. In front of her favorite Rodins, Allison Pearson recalls a traumatic episode she suffered at the hands of a schoolteacher following a trip to the Musée in Paris. Neil Gaiman admires the fantastic world depicted in British outsider artist Richard Dadd's “The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke,” a tiny painting that also decorated the foldout cover of a Queen album, housed in the Victorian room of Tate Britain's Pre-Raphaelite collection. Ann Patchett fondly revisits Harvard University's Museum of Natural History—which she discovered at 19, while in the throes of summer romance with a biology student named Jack. In Search of the Originals is a treasure trove of wonders, a tribute to the diversity and power of the museums, the safe-keepers of our world's most extraordinary artifacts, and an intimate look into the deeply personal reveries we fall into when before great art.

Eyewitness Treasure takes a look at the wide variety of precious objects that have been the seeds of greed, conquest, crime, and adventure over the history of humankind. Read about how these treasures were created, how they were lost, and how they've been uncovered by explorers and scientists.

The first exclusive study of a group of buildings of outstanding historical and architectural interest. John G. Dunbar discusses the organisation of the royal works, the roles of the principal officials and tradesmen responsible for the construction of these palaces and how they functioned when the king and court were in residence. He focuses particularly on Linlithgow, Falkland, Stirling, Holyroodhouse and Edinburgh Castle.

On the path of cultivation, the spirit was revered, the mysteries of yin and yang were stolen, and the fortune of heaven and earth was seized! Defying ten thousand principles, defying the will of the heavens, finally becoming a saint! Don't ask about the path of life or death when you're on the verge of death. To live one's life as a sovereign, to tread across thousands of rivers and thousands of mountains, to visit the nine heavens of the Azure Dragons! Even as a man, he would rule the world! [Previous Chapter] [Table of Contents] [Next Chapter] Close]

This is a cross-cultural study of the multifaceted relations between Buddhism, its materiality, and instances of religious violence and destruction in East Asia, which remains a vast and still largely unexplored field of inquiry. Material objects are extremely important not just for Buddhist practice, but also for the conceptualization of Buddhist doctrines; yet, Buddhism developed ambivalent attitudes towards such need for objects, and an awareness that even the most sacred objects could be destroyed. After outlining Buddhist attitudes towards materiality and its vulnerability, the authors propose a different and more inclusive definition of iconoclasm-a notion that is normally not employed in discussions of East Asian religions. Case studies of religious destruction in East Asia are presented, together with a new theoretical framework drawn from semiotics and cultural studies, to address more general issues related to cultural value, sacredness, and destruction, in an attempt to understand instances in which the status and the meaning of the sacred in any given culture is questioned, contested, and ultimately denied, and how religious institutions react to those challenges.

As World War II approaches, Kare Hoffmann, student of cinematography, feels its effects immediately. His father is thrown into prison after speaking out against the Nazi regime. Kare escapes Germany and hops from uncle to uncle, seeking sanctuary from the Gestapo. He travels to Great Britain, only to discover that his Jewish mother in Germany was sent to a concentration camp after being exploited by her brother-in-law. After working in London at Denham Studios, he is selected for a mission by the Special Intelligence Office (SOE) in Britain and must abandon his family. Once completing his training as a spy, Kare obtains a position at Babelsberg, UFA Film Studios from director Herbert Selpin. Soon, Kare sends secret reports of German propaganda to Britain. In the meantime, he meets and falls in love with Monika, a beautiful Aryan woman. When his superior reveals Kares Jewish background to the Gestapo and he is sent to multiple concentration camps, Kares loyalty to his family, Monika, and his country is tested. Is he able to fulfill his mission for Britain, save his parents, and repair his fragile relationship with Monika? More importantly, can he survive the brutality of the Gestapo?