Found in the London Review Bookshop, May 2017

No matter how many times self promises never to buy another book, she always caves. This time, though, she successfully resisted buying anything from the London Review Bookshop, anything except for the above book, a publication of the Royal Collection Trust in London. Every page is a veritable feast for the eyes:

The Frigate Pelican, by John James Audubon (The Birds of America, 1827 – 1838)

Among the sketches found in Leonardo da Vinci’s studio after his death were a series about dragons. In his mind, there was absolutely no question that the creatures existed:

• Several kinds of dragon were thought to have possessed wings sprouting from the shoulders. Leonardo, as an experienced and extremely knowledgeable comparative anatomist, would have pondered the bodily mechanisms that such creatures must have possessed to operate such limbs. On a sheet of studies of a saint…