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Hello and welcome to Spectator's Book Club podcast.

I'm Sam Leith, the literary edge of The Spectator.

This week I'm very very pleased to be joined by the critic and writer Laura Cumming,

whose new book is Thunder Clap, a memoir of art and life and sudden death.

And it's a book that manages to be simultaneously about art and Dutch art in particular, and Laura's own father, Jimmy.

Laura, welcome.

Can you start by telling me how these elements of the book come together?

Well, that's a hard question.

Well, you know, when you start to write a book, very often you have a shape to it.

And the last book was a palindrome in my head.

And this one's a kind of Dutch plat.

So if you think of sort of blonde hair and a plat, there is three themes.

And one is sight and the gift of sight and the unbelievable, amazing fact of the visible world all around us.

And the second is the way that the visible world all around us is reproduced in millions, literally millions of Dutch

paintings from the Golden Age, you know, everything from the fishing smack to the herring

on the plate, to the burger with the rough and so on, a girl reading a letter, Vermeer,

Hal's, Rembrandt and so on. And the third plat, I suppose,

in it is the person who links these two things together for me, who is my father, beautifully described

by you as Jimmy coming, because he was always known as Jimmy coming. And he was a painter.

The only trip I ever took abroad with him in my growing up, well, in our growing up years together before he died, was to the Netherlands.

And we both had this kind of passion for Dutch paintings.

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