Jim ede

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 home, his prep-school boarding house, his student digs, his down-and-out bedsit and so on through barracks, shacks, flats, garrets, terraces, townhouses and final Georgian-rectory resting-place. Walk a mile in their shoes – then put on their carpet slippers. So, to know Horace Walpole, we board the 33 bus to Strawberry Hill. For Henry Moore, it’s

Alfred Wallis (1855-1942) should be an inspiration to all late starters. It was not until he had passed the age of 70 that, after his wife of many years had died and having previously worked as a sailor, fisherman and rag and bone merchant, he decided to take up art. ‘Aw! I dono how to pass away time,’ he explained to a shopkeeper in his native town of St Ives. ‘I think I’ll do a bit a paintin’ — think I’ll draw a bit.’ Three years later, his work was spotted by the leading British modernists Ben Nicholson and Christopher Wood. By and by, Wallis’s pictures were being exhibited in