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In this exuberant celebration of the worlds museums, great and small, revered writers like Ann Patchett, Julian Barnes, Ali Smith, and more tell us about their favorite museums, including the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York, the Musée Rodin in Paris, and the Prado in Madrid. These essays, collected from the pages of The Economists Intelligent Life magazine, reveal the special hold that some museums have over us all. Acclaimed novelist William Boyd visits the Leopold Museum in Vienna--a shrine to his favorite artist, Egon Schiele, whom Boyd first discovered on a postcard as a University student. In front of her favorite Rodins, Allison Pearson recalls a traumatic episode she suffered at the hands of a schoolteacher following a trip to the Musée in Paris. Neil Gaiman admires the fantastic world depicted in British outsider artist Richard Dadds "The Fairy Fellers Master-Stroke," a tiny painting that also decorated the foldout cover of a Queen album, housed in the Victorian room of Tate Britains Pre-Raphaelite collection. Ann Patchett fondly revisits Harvard Universitys Museum of Natural History--which she discovered at 19, while in the throes of summer romance with a biology student named Jack. Treasure Palaces is a treasure trove of wonders, a tribute to the diversity and power of the museums, the safe-keepers of our worlds most extraordinary artifacts, and an intimate look into the deeply personal reveries we fall into when before great art. --
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