Grade: A- Why don’t you go outside and get some fresh air instead of playing that stupid game? A) I’ve been outside, and I didn’t like it. And B) there’s a game for that. A Highland Song excellently simulates the experience of going outside for a walk and regretting it. Moira sets off to meet
My pilgrim companion William Parsons and I did not call our first journey a pilgrimage. Rather, it was a song walk: a walk with a purpose of taking a song, ‘The Hartlake Bridge Tragedy’, back to where it came from. It was also an attempt to reclaim my place in the world, after too much
On 13 December 1643, a Puritan minister called Richard Culmer borrowed the Canterbury town ladder and carefully leaned it against the Cathedral’s Royal Window. He then ascended the ladder’s 60-odd rungs, holding a pike; according to his account, modestly written in the third person, ‘Some people wished he might break his neck.’ Culmer had in
There is a (possibly apocryphal) story about William Morris, where he spends most of his time in Paris inside the Eiffel Tower’s restaurant because ‘that is the only place where you can’t see the damned thing’. Aviva Studios risks a similar fate. Designed by architects OMA as the permanent performance venue for the Manchester International
This month marks the 100th anniversary of Walt Disney’s company. The first cartoons it was founded to produce – the animation/live-action shorts Alice Comedies – are largely forgotten, eclipsed not least by the resounding success of Mickey Mouse. Mickey Mouse grabbed much of the attention from the get-go, including that of several philosophers, sociologists and
While looking at Claudette Johnson’s splendid exhibition Presence at the Courtauld Gallery, I kept trying to pin down an elusive connection. Her works are large drawings (sometimes very large – one reclining figure is more than two-and-a-half metres wide), and each one zooms in on a single figure seen in close-up, often larger than life-size.
There should really be a special word for it: that vicarious fragility you feel when hearing of a minor decision with catastrophically heavy consequences, as if a falling acorn had tipped a boulder. In the case of John O’Hegarty, the subject of the engrossing podcast I’m Not Here To Hurt You, the catalyst for disaster
In 1957, when my dear godmother, the Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava (1941-2020), was 16, she began her diary. The granddaughter of the Duke of Rutland and daughter of Loel Guinness, an MP, financier and Battle of Britain pilot, Lindy Dufferin had a gilded childhood. Her entries as a teen are like no other: ‘Randolph
If there’s one thing the internet knows, it’s that cats sell. The Scottish painter Elizabeth Blackadder, who died in 2021 at the age of 89, knew it too. Her sinuous, characterful cat pictures, watercolours mostly but also oils and prints, helped cement her place as the nation’s favourite painter. She was an establishment favourite too,
One of the annoying things about too many contemporary museums is that, having ditched old-fashioned closely typed descriptive labels and display cases, they often seem to be pitched at the level of a 12-year-old. So it’s refreshing to go to a museum that really is for 12-year-olds – or, at least, babies to 14-year-olds. Three
As I sat down at this year’s Serpentine Pavilion, I overheard a curious exchange. ‘You mustn’t create art within art,’ said an invigilator frostily. He was telling off Fred Pilbrow, an architect, who had been taking in the Pavilion’s sociable atmosphere with friends and painting a watercolour of the scene. They proceeded to enter a
Show me your downstairs loo and I will tell you who you are. Better yet, show me your kitchen, bedroom, billiard room and man cave. Can we know a man – or woman – by their house? The ‘footsteps’ approach to biography argues that to really understand a subject, a biographer must visit his childhood
I have a soft spot for specimen jars and skeletal remains. Museums of natural history, surgical pioneering or anthropological oddities have always struck me as equally suitable for lunch breaks and first dates as for serious study and research. As far as public and casually accessible encounters with mortality go, these kinds of museums are
Hermitage, where the heel of Roxburghshire kicks into the once-lawless Debatable Lands, seems an unlikely place to find a botanical artist. It’s hard to make anything grow here, let alone an exhibition-load of rare and sometimes exotic plants. Lorded over by Hermitage Castle, a menacing hulk of medieval brutalism described by George MacDonald Fraser as
David Starkey’s commentary on the Queen’s funeral on GB News was generally agreed to be the best of all the TV coverage, and now he is covering the coronation, and has made a three-part documentary about it for GB News called The Crown. Of course he knows the history, going back to King Edgar’s coronation
War has broken out in theatreland. Managements are increasingly at odds with the audiences who fund their livelihoods. A recent stand-off involved James Norton’s new show, A Little Life, which contains a couple of scenes in which the actor removes his clothes. A punter at a preview in Richmond secretly photographed the moments of nudity
One day in October 1966 I came home from school and found a large man stripped to the waist, attacking the family piano with a woodman’s axe. Seeing the anxious look on my face, my father assured me there was nothing to be afraid of. The axe-wielding man was, he explained, an ‘artist’ who was
Advance ticket sales for My Neighbour Totoro, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s current production running till mid-January, beat all Barbican box-office records. I went on a rainy weekday evening last month, and the place was heaving with Hayao Miyazaki fans of all ages, lots of them clutching furry Totoros they’d bought in the theatre shop. It’s
Where do you see paintings by Ruskin Spear (1911–90)? In the salerooms mostly, because his work in public collections is rarely on display. Until the National Portrait Gallery closed for redevelopment it was, however, possible to study Spear’s splendid portrait of ‘Citizen James’ (Sid James) peering from a black and white TV screen, and his
‘This is not a book,’ is the first line of Paul Gauguin’s final memoir, Avant et Après, written on Hiva Oa in the Marquesas Islands in 1903 a couple of months before his death aged 54 from syphilitic heart disease. In his dedication to the critic André Fontainas he describes the manuscript as ‘born of
