Like all great artists and visionaries, John Ruskin was a time-traveller. His aesthetic reached far into our present, his future, and deep into the past we have yet to uncover, from the deep time of the minerals and rocks he collected, like talismans or instruments, to the urgency of his Fors Clavigera newsletters, which prefigure our own social media and podcasts. He looks back too, through the visionary eyes of Albert Dürer, as he called him, in whose astonishingly prescient images of the natural world were mapped his own. At the same time Ruskin inspired a floppy-haired young man, who was doing his own impersonation of Dürer's dandy style: Oscar Wilde.
Taking these three vivid figures, Philip Hoare will explore the nature of their aesthetic, and the aesthetic of their natural world. With an eclectic supporting cast, ranging from Thomas Mann to Andy Warhol, William Blake and Marianne Moore to Patti Smith, Hoare will draw on his recent book, Albert & the Whale - a work which prompted the New York Times to call Hoare 'a forceful weather system of his own' - the author, curator and broadcaster will take us on a whirlwind tour of images and ideas, in a possibly forlorn attempt to pin these geniuses down.
Philip Hoare is the author of nine works of non-fiction, including biographies of Stephen Tennant and Noël Coward, and the studies, Wilde's Last Stand and England's Lost Eden: Adventures in a Victorian Utopia. Spike Island was chosen by W.G. Sebald as his book of the year for 2001. In 2009, Hoare's Leviathan or, The Whale won the 2009 BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction. It was followed in 2013 by The Sea Inside, and in 2017 by RISINGTIDEFALLINGSTAR. His latest book, Albert & the Whale, led the New York Times to call the author a 'forceful weather system' of his own.
Philip is also co-curator, with Angela Cockayne, of the digital projects www.mobydickbigread.com and www.ancientmarinerbigread.com; and he swims every day in the sea.