Planetary rings may be one of space’s many spectacles, but in our solar system, they’re a dime a dozen. While Saturn’s rings are the brightest and most extensive, Jupiter and Uranus and Neptune have them, too, likely the dwindling remains of shredded asteroids or comets. What’s more, four icy minor planets—Chariklo, Chiron, Quaoar, and Haumea—that orbit among or beyond our gas giants, also host ring systems. Even so, it would be fanciful to imagine that Earth once had a ring system of its own, wouldn’t it? I mean, that just seems almost too cool to be true.
Or is it?
It was only meant to be for a year. The restaurant was my husband Avi’s dream, not mine. As a time-poor novelist and mother of three, the very last thing I needed was another commitment to take me away from my desk. But I also knew that my comfortable London life as a freelance writer and stay-at-home mother was only possible because Avi was our family’s main bread winner. So when, in 2006, he was made redundant from his detested job in IT, I felt I owed it to him to help make his dream a reality.
You’d expect such a beverage to be niche, an acquired taste one orders from a specialty shop, not found in millions of homes and major fast food chains. But what’s even weirder than Dr Pepper’s flavor is that we’re living through a Dr Pepper renaissance.
I had never actually seen the Northern Lights. I’ve spent all of my adult life living in cities, so they’re something that I’ve just had to assume existed, you know, like stars. But I was intrigued and in need of some fresh mountain air, so I was in. At our arrival point at the Fairmont Hotel in Lake Louise, a body of water as crystal blue as a Halls Mentho-Lyptus Cough Drop, we met our guides for the event. Matt and Ben are Australians who have made their home in Banff and their living as astrophotographers. They’d be tracking the solar flares via the SpaceWeatherLive app, and if viewing conditions looked particularly good, regardless of the time of night, we’d have to drop what we were doing and go. We might get some 3 a.m. lobby calls. Listen, the last time I got up in the middle of the night to chase something down, it was Oasis reunion tickets, and that shit didn’t work out. But Matt and Ben are—in the grand tradition of Australians and Matt-and-Ben duos—extremely charismatic, so I was willing to go where they led me. Handsome people will never disappoint you. It’s science.
Mantel spoke about fact and fiction being blended in her work like olive oil and egg yolk in mayonnaise – you can’t return them to their original states. Here, Mosse gives us both the satisfying intricacy of historical fact and a fictional narrative that carries us along at a rollicking pace. The long, rich, tragic history of the Huguenots deserved a series of novels as brilliant and well researched as these, in which the past is felt deep in the reader’s bones.
Gayford understands that painting has often gone in and out of fashion: in his new book he writes that the mid-1980s was an interval “during which the medium was marginalised, declared deceased or moribund – as it has been more times than can be easily counted, ever since the 19th-century French painter Paul Delaroche first made the declaration that painting was dead in 1839”.
Confounding Delaroche, this book’s strength is that it darts from the greats of art history’s past – Gayford seems to have seen everything and thought deeply about all of it – to contemporary painters such as Oscar Murillo, Jadé Fadojutimi, Cecily Brown, Eric Fischl and Frank Bowling, to whom he speaks, and about whom he bubbles with enthusiasm.