Harry Mount is editor of The Oldie and author of How England Made the English (Penguin) and Et Tu, Brute? The Best Latin Lines Ever (Bloomsbury)
Sixty per cent of the best Renaissance art is said to be in Italy, and half of that is in Florence. So why bother going to Florence for a particular Renaissance sculpture exhibition when there’s huge amounts of the stuff on show in the city’s museums any day of the year? It’s true that some
At evensong in Trinity College, Cambridge last Sunday, Ann Widdecombe was preaching. The pews were packed, with many in the congregation bagging seats half an hour before the service began. ‘Strictly Come Dancing fans,’ my neighbour whispered to me. They might have been a little disappointed when she didn’t tango down the nave past the
Hallelujah! The minimalist fashion for dreary acres of white walls is coming to an end. During the long decade that the Rijksmuseum has been closed — it was only supposed to be shut for three years — the taste for colourless voids has come and, please God, is going. Jean-Michel Wilmotte, the designer behind the
Now that his old arch-enemy, Boris Berezovsky, has bitten the dust, Roman Abramovich can devote his full attention to another bête noire — London’s terraced houses. In his £10 million plan to knock together three houses, worth £100 million, in Chelsea’s Cheyne Walk, the oligarch is raising the roof, ripping out internal floors and walls,
The title of the new show at the Palazzo Strozzi is a little confusing. Most of the artists in Italy in the 1930s weren’t beyond fascism; they were in it up to their necks. They didn’t really need much persuading by Mussolini to come up with pictures like Luciano Ricchetti’s 1939 painting ‘Listening to a
Ronald Blythe, our greatest rural writer, remembers sheep being driven through Lavenham, the Suffolk wool town, before the war. Now he’s lived long enough to see the same street filled with Japanese tourists. On the eve of his 90th birthday, on 6 November, Blythe doesn’t mourn that lost way of life. If anything, Akenfield —
London was an industrial city until remarkably recently. It seems extraordinary now, but Bankside Power Station was built in 1947, by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, to burn oil right on the banks of the Thames, opposite St Paul’s. What’s more, Gilbert Scott’s other great power station, Battersea, built in 1929, is less than a mile
This rainy weather has occasionally softened my rock-hard cynicism about climate change. I have bicycled around London for 25 years — and I usually get drenched about half a dozen times a year. This week, I have been soaked six times in as many days. For a moment, I nearly fell for the theory, suggested
If you wanted a little more excitement in this year’s Olympic marathon, you could do worse than imitate the race in 1908 — the first time the Games were held in London. Competitors, running from Windsor Castle to Shepherd’s Bush in the boiling heat, were given hot and cold Oxo, rice pudding and milk, but
Why did Florence become a hotspot for Americans in the late 19th and early 20th century? Henry James, Edith Wharton, John Singer Sargent and a gang of other American artists and writers descended on the Arno, often for years at a time. Sargent, born in Florence, the son of a Philadelphia eye surgeon, didn’t get
In the constant light of summer, Tromsø is an extraordinarily civilised place from which to visit the wilderness, discovers Harry Mount ‘Why do the British look so ill?’ I was asked by a 23-year-old woman at a dinner party in the Arctic Norwegian city of Tromsø. ‘Is it because they have chips for breakfast?’ She
At last, 18 years after leaving university, the call comes to appear on the University Challenge Christmas Special. A wonderful boost for my intellectual vanity. Not so good for the physical sort. Halfway through filming, at Granada Studios in Manchester, a man in props approached me in the make-up room. ‘I’m afraid you’re strobing,’ he
Extraordinary how potent cheap drama is. The latest season of Downton Abbey, which ended on Sunday, pulled off a rare double in its interpretation of the first world war — making you laugh one second at the wooden acting and the clunky script; the next second, making you cry at the suffering and tragedy. But
It is 60 years since Nikolaus Pevsner published Middlesex, the first in ‘The Buildings of England’ series. It is 60 years since Nikolaus Pevsner published Middlesex, the first in ‘The Buildings of England’ series. The small, southern county was chosen for the prosaic reason that it didn’t need much rationed fuel for research. His achievement
Travelling the 400 miles from Glasgow to London recently, Theodore Dalrymple noticed that the roadside was littered with food and drink packaging, flapping in the wind like Buddhist prayer flags. Roads didn’t look like that in the boyhood of Dr Dalrymple (b. 1949). Nor are they like that on the Continent. Littering, he concludes, is
It was in his room in Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1875 that Oscar Wilde said, ‘I find it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china.’ Now, more than 130 years after he left Magdalen, with a double first in classics, the room has been decorated in his memory by Robert
Ian Fleming understood the attractions of an English summer. At the end of Dr No, James Bond is in Jamaica, his arch enemy dead, his knockout girlfriend, Honey Rider, about to leap into their double sleeping bag. And yet, despite being in paradise, Bond longs for ‘the douce weather of England — the soft airs,
Some schoolboys used to know about Alexander the Great (356–323BC), how he extended the Macedonian Empire from Greece to India, cut the Gordian knot, and wept when there were no more worlds to conquer. Fewer schoolboys — or grown-ups — will know how skilled, and moving, the art of the Macedonian court was. Now they
Critics have been predicting the death of the public lecture ever since Johannes Gutenberg got his printing press going in 1450. Why bother negotiating the market-day crowds in downtown Mainz to hear someone read from the Bible, when you can sit by the fire in your parlour and read your own copy? The same argument
Harry Mount looks across the Dardanelles and sees yesterday’s weather today In Canakkale — the biggest town on the Dardanelles, where more than 130,000 British, Australians, New Zealanders and Turks were slaughtered in the 1915 campaign — Mark Wallinger, the 2007 Turner Prize winner, has dreamt up a clever little work about memory. On the