The Public Diplomat: A First Person Account

2003 ◽  
Vol 9 (6) ◽  
pp. 439-445 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher A. Vassilas

As we doctors are beginning to understand more and more about dementia, the public has become increasingly aware of the condition and in turn this has been reflected in the arts. This article discusses four books whose main focus is the experience of dementia, each written from an entirely different perspective: a novel giving a first-person account of dementia by the Dutch writer J. Bernlef; a biography of the famous novelist Iris Murdoch by her husband John Bayley; Linda Grant's account of her mother's multi-infarct dementia (which also describes Jewish migration to the UK two generations ago); and Michael Igniateff's autobiographical novel Scar Tissue. Such accounts, offering insights into how patients and carers feel, cannot but help make us better doctors.


Author(s):  
Margaret Dalivalle ◽  
Martin Kemp ◽  
Robert B. Simon

Chapter 1 presents a first-person account of the discovery of the Salvator Mundi, from its appearance as a copy at an American auction to its establishment as the lost original painting by Leonardo da Vinci. Robert Simon presents a chronological account of his involvement with the acquisition, research, conservation, and scholarly verification of the work over the period from 2005 to 2011, when the painting was included in the landmark exhibition at the National Gallery, Leonardo da Vinci Painter at the Court of Milan. The modern provenance of the painting is reviewed, focusing on its tenure in the Cook Collection of Richmond, its sale in 1958, and its reappearance in New Orleans. The conservation of the painting by Dianne Dwyer Modestini is discussed, as well as the research process, and the introduction of the painting to art historians, Leonardo specialists, the press, and, eventually, the public.


Author(s):  
Aaron J. Kachuck

The Solitary Sphere in the Age of Virgil uses an enriched tripartite model of Roman culture—touching not only the public and the private, but also the solitary—in order to present a new interpretation of Latin literature and of the historical causes of this third sphere’s relative invisibility in scholarship. By connecting Cosmos and Imperium to the Individual, the solitary sphere was not so much a way of avoiding politics as a political education in itself. As reimagined by literature in this age, this sphere was an essential space for the formation of the new Roman citizen of the Augustan revolution, and was behind many of the notable features of the literary revolution of Virgil’s age: the expansion of the possibilities of the book of poetry, the birth of the literary cursus, new coordinations of cosmology and politics within strictly organized schemes, the attraction of first-person genres, and the subjective style. Through close readings of Cicero’s late works and the oeuvres of Virgil, Horace, and Propertius and the works of other authors in the age of Virgil, The Solitary Sphere thus presents a radical reinterpretation of classical Roman literature, and contributes to the study of premodern culture more generally, especially for traditions that have taken antiquity as too fixed a point in their own literary, religious, and cultural histories.


1984 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-110 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. M. O'Neal
Keyword(s):  

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 69-106
Author(s):  
John Wyatt Greenlee ◽  
Anna Fore Waymack

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: THE TRAVELS OF Sir John Mandeville, the fourteenth-century "first-person" account of a fictional English knight's adventurous journey to Jerusalem and across the world, is difficult to teach.1 Popular with medieval European audiences, the book troubles today's students with its confusing descriptions of global geography, its treatment of non-Christian, non-European peoples, and its constant conflation of fact and fable. But, as those who have taught it can attest, it can serve as a valuable tool for challenging students' preconceptions of an isolated European Middle Ages. It introduces them to an unreliable narrator and to tensions between the doctrines of the institutional Roman church and individual faith. The author's global perspective shows students a world of diverse religions, ethnicities, races, diets, customs, and sexualities. And the Travels does this while being relatively short and entertaining, pulling the reader through the map via its engaging narrative of landscaped vignettes.


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