ANDY HEDGECOCK is entertained by a playful novel that embeds a fictional game at its heart
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Theodore Gericault's The Raft of the Medusa
The Raft of the Medusa
Death comes for Liberals, entitled murder, Vatican hit squads, and fraternising with the Blitz killer
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GABRIELE NEHER draws attention to an astoundingly skilled Flemish painter who defied the notion that women cannot paint like men
The Bard pays homage to Hull’s finest promoter and venue, and awards Douze Points to Laibach
KEVIN DONNELLY outlines how the bourgeois institutions inhibit our ability to to view art in revolutionary ways, and suggests some tactics to overturn it
ON JULY 2, 1816, the French navy frigate Meduse ran aground 100 miles off the coast of Mauretania in Africa due to the navigational incompetence of its master Viscount Hugues Duroy de Chaumareys, a protege of the French foreign minister.
Some 147 people — for whom there was no room in the lifeboats — were put on an improvised raft to be towed. But, in a callous act of wilful and criminal negligence of duty, it was cut adrift on the orders of de Chaumareys.
Only 15 were to survive the two-week ordeal at sea before they were rescued. Immediately, stories of dehydration, starvation, brutality, murder and cannibalism emerged, when a report by the ship’s surgeon, Henri Savigny, was leaked to the newspaper Journal des Debats and published on September 13 1816.
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