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Setting limits

While the ENO Ring was in preparation, and we were seeing semi-staged performances of the dramas at the old Coliseum and the Barbican, there were plenty of grounds for hope. With action reduced to almost a minimum, we could concentrate on the real action, which needs, I have increasingly come to feel, very little in

Child’s play

Compton Verney House has reopened for its second season, continuing its founder Sir Peter Moore’s aim of bringing art which is under-represented elsewhere in Britain to a new audience. Alongside landscape paintings by the 17th-century Neapolitan artist Salvator Rosa is a larger, thematic exhibition, Only Make-Believe, curated by Marina Warner, who brings to the task

The Manx factor

Bryan Kneale comes from the Isle of Man and, after winning the Rome Prize from the Royal Academy Schools, was one of the leaders of the British sculptural revolution of the 1950s and 60s. In 1970, against the advice of his friends and fellow-artists, he was the first abstract sculptor to join the Royal Academy.

Hero of the counter-culture

Robert Crumb (born Philadelphia 1943) is variously hailed as a ‘virtuoso weirdo’, the ‘father of underground comics’ and ‘the Brueghel of the last half of the 20th century’. Robert Hughes is responsible for that final appellation and one can see his point, though Nicholas Garland has called this assessment ‘just silly’, and Crumb himself has