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...
