Catherine the Great

Worthwhile review of 'Catherine the Great: Love, Sex and Power' over at The Telegraph. The review is a tidy survey of the biography's exploration of one of history's significant political forces and a god-like patron of the arts.

"By turns adoring, greedy, humorous, demanding, canny and disingenuous, she is always hungry for knowledge and stimulation, reading voraciously and summoning Diderot - whose private library she had bought to save him from poverty - for nightly conversations. Her serial relationships, Rounding argues, were the result of an endless search for honesty."

I can think of no better motive than the 'search for honesty' in many an artist and patron's life pursuits. Aware as I am of my own mortality and the fictions of society life, that I see some of myself in Catherine's struggle is what makes her great to me.