Rosalind Polly Blakesley
speaker
237 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 23 Jul
Rosalind Polly Blakesley’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
position to the Russian Academy, the Imperial Academy of Arts in St.
Petersburg.
And for that, she describes beautifully every moment of the admission ceremony.
She describes walking into the hall.
It's a room I've been in.
The Academy of Arts in St.
Petersburg is in the same building it was in when she was there.
And she describes walking up through sort of serried ranks of admirers to the president at that time, a man called Stroganov.
And she's just clearly really proud because here's her moment of doing it on her own merits without any intervention from anybody else.
And it's sort of this is mine.
This is my achievement.
Her memoirs are enigmatic and confounding and a brilliant read.
partly because she can be so waspish about people.
I mean, she can just be so unkind.
There's one woman she really has it in for, the Duchess de Mazarin, who is stout and ugly and, you know, lots of very, very sort of unkind words.
But the best bit is she describes a dinner party where the Duchess apparently decided it's a dinner party for 100 guests and the Duchess decides that she will have her cook serve an enormous pie in which there are 100 tiny living birds.
And with great, you know, sort of rigmarole, the pie is cut open.
But all these birds fly up and they decide to settle in the hairdos of the guests, which are these, you know, vast powdered wigs heading up skywards.
It's a comic read at times.
But the bit that becomes complicated is when, you know, as an art historian or a cultural historian, you're trying to work out what relations might actually have been like.
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