Louisa Treger, "The Dragon Lady" & James Meyer, "The Art of Return"

Treger, a classical violinist, made her literary debut with The Lodger, which followed the life of the British modernist writer Dorothy Richardson in early 20th-century London. Her second novel again blends intriguing fact and deft fiction, this time telling the story of the talented and unconventional Lady Virginia Courtauld (1883-1972). In 1923, the impetuous Ginie, after a scandalous divorce, married Stephen Courtauld, heir to a textile fortune and ten years her junior. After years of struggling with social ostracism, the two became citizens of Rhodesia in 1954. There they funded a number of theatres and galleries and courted more trouble for themselves by working for racial equality.

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As the sixties themselves did, Meyer’s exploration of our collective cultural imagination of that tumultuous era encompasses politics, history, art, idealism, and much more, both in this country and around the world. Meyer, a curator at the National Gallery of Art, combines art criticism, theory, memoir, and fiction to reimagine the years from the 1950s to the 1970s—the long Sixties—showing how it was a period of both promise and crisis. As he recreates the protests, marches, and thought of the era, he also studies what such reflective acts say about both the 1960s in particular and our relationship to memory, representation, and nostalgia.

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Produced by Tom Warren