… the bad, and the ugly

At Oxford in 1960, I had history tutorials from Alan Bennett. Just before he shot to stardom in the revue Beyond the Fringe, he was writing a thesis on the retinue of
Richard II. Another of his pupils was David Bindman, later a professor of art history at London University. I was collecting pottery and Bindman already had an impressive collection of drawings.

In his book Untold Stories (2005), Bennett wrote:

David Bindman would show me Old Master drawings he had picked up for a song, and Bevis Hillier would fetch along ceramics. I knew little of either and could neither confirm nor deny the confident attributions both boys put forward. But they taught me a more useful lesson than I ever taught them, namely that my own taste was for surfaces.

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Ross Clark

Britain is living beyond its means

Stephen Bayley says much the same thing, in different words, in his intriguing, clever, curious, maddening book:

For as long as I can remember, I have been helplessly engrossed with the look of things.