Julia Blackburn

"Of course, was an eccentric, and his life story reads like something invented by Edgar Allan Poe with a certain amount of help from Richard Jefferies, but we have always needed the eccentrics to point the way. It was Waterton who warned the Americans, for example, of the ultimate cost of their profligate destruction of their forests. It was Waterton who fought against the beginnings of pollution in the Industrial Revolution. It was he who turned the grounds of into a , even maintaining trees with holes in them in which birds could nest and building a special bank for s."

"In 1812, when he was retreating from the blood and confusion of Moscow and the disastrous , Napoleon had remarked that there was only a single step separating the sublime from the ridiculous. From moment that he was deposited on , until the day when his body was finally removed from the island twenty-five years later, the sublime and the ridiculous were often so closely intertwined that it was impossible to separate the one from the other. The servants and companions who were with him on the island still treated him with all the fear and respect that was owing to an , but the more they bobbed and bowed in Napoleon's presence and tried to maintain the illusion of , the more rigidly they need to shut out any mirror reflection of what they were doing and how they looked while they were doing it."

"In order to try to see what Goya saw, I have visited the places he knew well: the village of his childhood, the farmhouse where he stayed with the , the cities of , Madrid, and, finally, . In my mind's eye I can look across the landscapes that he once travelled through. I can walk the same streets, I can gaze out of the window of the house in which he was born and the house in which he died. Maybe that is another way of meeting a a man who died."

"Julia Blackburn, who lives in , became interested in in the wake of her husband ’s death in 2013. Makkink was a Dutch artist (he made the sinister phallic murder weapon in ), and there was something magnetic about the idea of this vanished territory that had once connected their two homelands. A magpie anyway, eyes to the ground, always turning up oddities, she’d become fascinated by the immense age of the worked flints and fossilised bones she kept finding in the eroding cliffs of beach, a place where “things … often appear magically out of nowhere and then vanish with an equal magic”."

"The author’s father, , was “a poet and an alcoholic”; her mother, Rosalie de Meric, a painter and an exhibitionist. Both parents were breathtaking narcissists and dirty fighters. Until they divorced, when Julia was 13, they scrapped loudly and vigorously. Rosalie would often thrust Julia in front of her to act as a shield from her husband’s fists. Once a punch missed and hit the child. “So sorry darling,” Thomas said. “No blood I hope?”"