Fans pick 100 books like The Idol Hunter

I am married to an auction veteran and have written on art and antiques in an earlier life so Frayn’s satirical farce hits all the right notes for me. A farce without slamming doors but plenty of misunderstandings and self-inflicted confusion.

Martin Clay, a philosopher turned amateur art historian and art expert, tumbles down the rabbit hole of self-delusion as he convinces himself that a painting he barely glimpsed is a lost Bruegel. He searches countless documents to find the facts that he twists to prove his hunch leading the reader on a deep dive into Dutch political and art history. Moral equivocation, adultery, tax evasion, double-dealing, plot twists and turns—everything a good farce should be.

I was hungry for a great piece of comic writing when a friend handed me this book, and it delivered so much more than laughter.

Once I’d tuned in to the language, I ended up shambling through 30s London alongside impecunious painter Gulley Jimson. A humble man, driven by a holy need to make the sort of art which, it turns out, nobody wants, he encounters a world of squalor and beauty, both physical and moral.

I grew to love him and his daily observations on the play of weather and light on the Thames, which form a sort of sketchbook. As Jimson’s physical health declines, he grips beauty wherever he finds it. Theroux, Lessing, and Updike all rated this author.

One of my favorite poets writing about one of my favorite artists. Cornell’s mysterious, alluring dreamscapes in his delicately crafted boxes meet their soulmate in the prose poems of Simic. In this work of only seventy-seven pages of short meditations on Cornell’s life, inspiration, and method, Simic creates the poetic equivalent of Cornell’s visual art. Simic recognizes, as did Cornell, that “The commonplace is miraculous if rightly seen, if recognized.”

I have never been able to look at Renaissance paintings of the Madonna and child the same after reading this brilliant and controversial book. I promise your eyes will be opened as well. These paintings were not simple religious decoration. Christ’s genitalia, exposed or covered, was a visible element in theological arguments in the Renaissance about the humanity of Christ. In our secular world, Steinberg argues, we have lost sight of the sexual component of these images. Steinberg’s breadth of learning is astounding, and the extensive footnotes are as stimulating as the text.  

There is no better scholar of modern Greece than Mark Mazower and his latest work on the Greek Revolution is a tour de force. As the title suggests, Mazower explores how the Greek Revolution, based on the “new politics” of national identity, overthrew Ottoman imperialism and established the world’s first true nation-state. The Greek Revolution gives us all the famous characters from 1821 in detail: Koloktronis, the brigand turned general who became a national hero. Ibrahim Pasha, the son of the Pasha of Egypt who dreamed of conquering Greece for himself. Ioannis Kapodistrias was a brilliant diplomat who became the first Greek head of state only to be murdered by his own people. And George Byron, the poet, turned adventurer, turned financer of the Greek Revolution who died of fever while campaigning for Greek freedom. At the same time, the book analyzes more universal characteristics of revolutions: their fundamental link… show more.

We are reminded on almost a daily basis of the plight of refugees in fragile boats that this sea can be cruel as well as kind. The present diaspora has its forerunners – in this book the great population exchange of 1923 that saw the displacement of two million people across the Mediterranean: Greeks living in the Ottoman Empire, Turks living in Greece. Bruce Clarke both explains the chain of events in the aftermath of the First World War and records the personal stories of those who were uprooted from the places they called home. They have a familiar resonance, the repeating patterns of memory and loss: ‘I remember the day they went away,’ recorded a Greek woman of her Muslim neighbours. ‘Some kissed the earth, some took bowls of soil with them. They were decent types; their menfolk used to attend our funerals, and we would exchange presents of… show more.

I read this years ago; it's one of the reasons I began writing historical romance novels. It's the story of Aspasia, a woman in ancient Greece. She's educated in a selective school for courtesans, beautiful, groomed for pleasure, and bought by a Persian man who comes seeking a courtesan from this famous establishment. He takes Aspasia back to Persia. Eventually, she is freed and returns to Athens, where she meets Pericles. Inspired in part by his love of Aspasia, Pericles initiated the building of the famous Acropolis in ancient Greece. 

I was fortunate to visit Athens after reading Glory and the Lightning, and standing on the Acropolis, I found myself thinking of Pericles and Aspasia, real people who lived and loved over 2,000 years ago. (And yes, I may have gotten a lump in my throat and one or two tears threatened.)

The ancient Greeks were not only good at making serious art such as epics and tragedies, they were also good at making fun of them in literature and art.

In the realm of art, the most abundant source of humor is painted vases, which were manufactured mostly for the use of men at symposia, or drinking parties.

Greek mythology was a favorite subject of the vase painters, and Mitchell’s richly-illustrated study of humorous vases provides a fun and unusual window into ancient burlesque treatments of Greek myths and legends.  

Although its eloquent erudition might now strike some people as a little old-fashioned this is a book about Greece that still works for me and is the product of a lifetime’s immersion in Greece and its history and culture, a place which Leigh-Fermor made his home and whose language he spoke fluently. This is not the Greece of the tourist resorts and the package tours, it is the Greece of the post-classical age brought to life by an independent scholar and consummate stylist.

This is a dual memoir and each woman is on a quest to redefine herself. Sue Monk Kidd as a writer and her daughter, Ann Kidd Taylor as she asks the age-old question: “what to do with my life.” 

Written in alternating chapters, mother and daughter write of their experiences and insights as they visit sacred sights in ancient lands, places rich with myth and legend and the sacred feminine. My journey too was as a seeker, a woman thick with an urgency to write as Sue was, and as a single woman exploring “now what?” 

While I traveled alone and these women traveled together, each of us was on our own individual journey, exploring, discovering, asking questions, and seeking answers that can often only be found when we travel within.