Mar 12, 2021 | Blog
Barbara Rose, the internationally celebrated art historian, curator, critic and filmmaker, who has died aged 84, was a pioneer in several fields of scholarship, ranging from the art of Romanesque Spain to contemporary Minimalism. In the course of a career lasting...
Dec 13, 2020 | Blog
Dirt: Adventures in French Cooking By Bill Buford, Jonathan Cape £18.99 Dirt has a bad name. What a shame that the UK publishers didn’t change the monosyllabic title of Bill Buford’s knotty, gripping memoir of restaurant kitchens in Lyon for British readers....
Dec 6, 2020 | Blog
Harold McGee’s Nose Dive: A Field Guide to the World’s Smells is an ambitious and enormous work. Indeed it’s so large, at 654 pages and weighing nearly a kilo, that I could only manage to read it at the kitchen table — which made me appreciate its...
Sep 26, 2020 | Blog
As the late Howard Hodgkin once said to me, “Everything we remember about the Sixties actually happened in the Seventies.” I know what he meant: fashion news had to trickle down to us, at the same time that our post-student grant incomes had to increase enough to make...
Jul 22, 2020 | Blog
Broiler fowl reared in atrocious conditions are responsible for countless cases of gastro-intestinal illness and death, says Paul R. Josephson Chicken: A History from Farmyard to Factory Paul R. Josephson Polity, pp. 252, £20 It wasn’t Henri IV’s Sunday poule au pot...
Apr 2, 2020 | Blog
Historian and biographer with a Bloomsbury background who unearthed forgotten writers of the First World War Hugh Cecil wrote The Flower of Battle Hugh Cecil had a special sympathy for the lost generation of young soldiers and writers of the First World War. When he...
Mar 31, 2020 | Blog
A pre-lockdown magazine feature The Amazon delivery guy rang the bell, then scampered off to safety behind the garden gate, a good distance, but not so far that he couldn’t hear and acknowledge my “thank you.” My wife is so far coping with her duties as a Parish...
Mar 5, 2020 | Blog
Self-portrait in a cap, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, 1630 When you walk down one corridor in the current Ashmolean Museum’s exhibition of Young Rembrandt you see half a dozen tiny-to-small, though not quite postage stamp-size etchings, which are self-portraits of the...
Feb 24, 2020 | Blog
A scene from Luisa Miller by Giuseppe Verdi @ London Coliseum. An English National Opera production. Directed by Barbora Horakova. Conductor, Alexander Joel. ©Tristram Kenton The English National Opera company is having a tough old time. Its personnel keep changing,...
Feb 23, 2020 | Blog
There’s something a bit ho-hum, mean and pinched about the reception of Sir Tom Stoppard’s new (and, he says, perhaps final play), Leopoldstadt. A minority has treated its opening this February in the 1899 Wyndham’s Theatre as a perfectly ordinary event, nothing...
