At that time I had neither visited Hong Kong nor ever read The South China Morning Post. I said: “Hong Kong, South China Morning Post, during the Handover”.
I still remember the street we were walking along in south London, as my answer, quite unplanned, would change my life. When I was there, being told just how hard it would be to find a job, a fellow student asked me where, if I could choose any newspaper or magazine in the world, I would most like to work. So I left to study journalism for a three month diploma at the London College of Printing. My first job was as a management trainee with Reuters, in London and Scandinavia, but I had a dream to be a real news journalist, writing about people’s lives at times of drama and trauma. I studied Social Anthropology at St Andrews University, Scotland and William & Mary College, Virginia, after spending time in Himalayan India, teaching in a Tibetan refugee camp and realising how amazing it was to learn about different cultures. Her most famous book is Colour: Travels Through The Paint Box. Victoria Finlay is a writer and journalist, known for her books on colour and jewels. The colors that craft our world have never looked so bright. Color is full of extraordinary people, events, and anecdotes–painted all the more dazzling by Finlay’s engaging style.Įmbark upon a thrilling adventure with this intrepid journalist as she travels on a donkey along ancient silk trade routes with the Phoenicians sailing the Mediterranean in search of a special purple shell that garners wealth, sustenance, and prestige with modern Chilean farmers breeding and bleeding insects for their viscous red blood. And the popular van Gogh painting White Roses at Washington’s National Gallery had to be renamed after a researcher discovered that the flowers were originally done in a pink paint that had faded nearly a century ago. Some of the first indigo plantations were started in America, amazingly enough, by a seventeen-year-old girl named Eliza. In the eighteenth century, black dye was called logwood and grew along the Spanish Main. Roman emperors used to wear togas dyed with a purple color that was made from an odorous Lebanese shellfish–which probably meant their scent preceded them. How did the most precious color blue travel all the way from remote lapis mines in Afghanistan to Michelangelo’s brush? What is the connection between brown paint and ancient Egyptian mummies? Why did Robin Hood wear Lincoln green? In Color, Finlay explores the physical materials that color our world, such as precious minerals and insect blood, as well as the social and political meanings that color has carried through time. In this vivid and captivating journey through the colors of an artist’s palette, Victoria Finlay takes us on an enthralling adventure around the world and through the ages, illuminating how the colors we choose to value have determined the history of culture itself.
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