Boston Flora

Tag: Financial Times

  • Tuesday, April 8, 7:00 pm – 8:00 pm GMT – The Swimming Pool Garden, Online and Recorded

    Christopher Woodward explores the history of swimming pools as features in the design of private gardens from the 17th-century until 1939. This Garden Museum program will be livestreamed on April 8 at 7 pm – 8 pm Greenwich Mean Time, and I’ll leave it to you to figure out just what that means in your time zone, but you will be able to access the talk after the event with a link which will be sent to registrants. The cost of the livestream is £10. Buy your ticket at https://gardenmuseum.org.uk/product/livestream-christophers-lecture-08-04-25/.

    In this talk, Christopher Woodward will begin by discussing candidates for the earliest swimming pool in Britain, and the distinction between cold bath and swimming pool in the Georgian age; public swimming pools became a phenomenon of the Victorian city but it was not until the Edwardian age that country house gardens gave centre stage to the pool as an ornamental feature.

    The 1920s and ‘30s were the Golden Age of the swimming pool, owing to a heady cocktail of Hollywood movies and Country Life magazine, chlorinated water and elasticated swimsuit – and for the first time men and women swimming together in a fashionable new sport.

    This talk is research in progress by Christopher Woodward, Director of the Garden Museum. Christopher is an architectural historian and a swimmer, who has recently swum 100 kilometres in Greece to raise funds for the new public garden of Lambeth Green. He reviews swimming pools for Country Life, the Telegraph and the Financial Times.

  • Sunday, April 12, 6:00 pm – Literary Lights

    The Associates of the Boston Public Library invite you to the 27th Annual Literary Lights Dinner on Sunday, April 12 beginning at 6 pm at The Boston Park Plaza Hotel.  This year the honorees are Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Author of Infidel, presented by Ambassador R. Nicholas Burns, Katherine Boo, author of Behind the Beautiful Forevers, presented by Jill Ker Conway, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, author of Plato at the Googleplex, presented by Alan Lightman, Wendell and Florence Minor, husband and wife collaborators on children’s books (pictured below,) presented by Mary Higgins Clark, Amor Towles, author of Rules of Civility, presented by Claire Messud, and Niall Ferguson, Keynote Speaker and author of The War of the World, presented by David Gergen.  Tickets ($475 and up) are available on line at www.literarylights.org. Proceeds will support the David McCullough Conservation Fund, William O. Taylor Art Preservation Fund, Associates Endowment Fund, and the Associates of the Boston Public Library’s operations.

  • Tuesday, September 30, 7:00 pm – The Book of Barely Imagined Beings

    From medieval bestiaries to Borges’s Book of Imaginary Beings, we’ve long been enchanted by extraordinary animals, be they terrifying three-headed dogs or asps impervious to a snake charmer’s song. But bestiaries are more than just zany zoology—they are artful attempts to convey broader beliefs about human beings and the natural order. Today, we no longer fear sea monsters or banshees. But from the infamous honey badger to the giant squid, animals continue to captivate us with the things they can do and the things they cannot, what we know about them and what we don’t.

    With The Book of Barely Imagined Beings, Caspar Henderson offers readers a fascinating, beautifully produced modern-day menagerie. But whereas medieval bestiaries were often based on folklore and myth, the creatures that abound in Henderson’s book—from the axolotl to the zebrafish—are, with one exception, very much with us, albeit sometimes in depleted numbers. The Book of Barely Imagined Beings transports readers to a world of real creatures that seem as if they should be made up—that are somehow more astonishing than anything we might have imagined. The yeti crab, for example, uses its furry claws to farm the bacteria on which it feeds. The waterbear, meanwhile, is among nature’s “extreme survivors,” able to withstand a week unprotected in outer space. These and other strange and surprising species invite readers to reflect on what we value—or fail to value—and what we might change.

    Caspar Henderson is a writer and journalist whose work has appeared in the Financial Times, the Independent, and New Scientist. He lives in Oxford, UK. He will appear at Porter Square Books, 25 White Street in Cambridge, on Tuesday, September 30 at 7 pm. For more information visit www.portersquarebooks.com.