Spectator Books

My guest in this week’s Book Club podcast is the art critic Laura Cumming. Her new book Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art and Life and Sudden Death talks about her fascination for the paintings of the Dutch 17th-century Golden Age, and in particular the entrancing work of the enigmatic Carel Fabritius. She tells me how her preoccupation links to the story of her artist father, why she thinks academic art historians too often miss the most important thing about paintings, and how looking at a work of art makes it possible to commune with the dead.