Barbara Rose, art historian with a colourful private life

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...

A foodie in his element – Dirt (by Bill Bufurd)

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....

Unpleasant smells can actually enhance pleasure

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...

All Dressed Up and Raring to Go

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...

Obituary Hugh Cecil

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...

A Slice of Life in Lockdown

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...

The Young Rembrandt: not a prodigy

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...