The School of Life Sunday Sermon: Edmund De Waal on Tact

Join Edmund de Waal for a journey along the fine line that separates the tactful from the tactless.; The potter and writer Edmund de Waal is among the most subtle and eloquent of artists at work today. His international bestseller The Hare with the Amber Eyes (2010) is celebrated as one of the most extraordinary memoirs ever written. What lies at its core is his masterful handling of details and silences: a rare kind of tact with a particular power.; De Waal warns that tact is a dangerous virtue. As a wise man once said tact ‘is the ability to make a person see lightening without letting him feel the bolt.’ One poorly judged move and we’re in trouble. We need to be at our most diplomatic when the stakes are high. But in our fast-paced high-pressure culture where we fire off blunt messages without a second glance we’re at risk of losing this vital art.; De Waal will share with us what he has discovered about the art of tact from a adulthood spent exploring the delicacy of porcelain alongside the difficulty of the unsaid. He will draw on examples from the fields of poetry music and the visual arts as well as everyday life to take us on a life-enhancing journey along the fine line that separates the tactful from the tactless.; Edmund de Waal is a leading ceramicist and the author of the international bestseller The Hare with the Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance (2010) for which he won the Costa Biography Award and the RSL Ondaatje Prize. He recently created major ceramic installations for the V&A and Tate Britain. His current exhibition at Waddesdon Manor until 28 October examines collecting and how objects are kept together lost stolen or dispersed.; TICKETS: £15.00