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...
Feb 5, 2020 | Blog
February 5, 2020 by Paul Levy Alan Cumming and Daniel Radcliffe in Rough for Theatre II (Photo Manuel Hardan) For one reason or another, we hadn’t been to the Old Vic since the daft unisex loos were installed, and, said my wife, “Something else has changed.” It was...
Feb 3, 2020 | Blog
THE BOTTLE On Thursday, 23rd January, we had a small party at Millwood Farm. Though as it happened all our guests had our recovered good health to celebrate, that was not the reason for the gathering. Our excuse to dine on foie gras, tomato salad and burrata, and...
