Gardening
My uncle Robin Ironside bewailed the demise, after the scandal of the Wilde trial and the early death of Beardsley, of the imaginative tradition which, he wrote, ‘had been kept flickering in England since the end of the 18th century, sometimes with a wild, always uneasy light, by a succession of gifted eccentrics’.
The truth is that he himself was one of those very eccentrics. Born in 1912 of a staunchly upper middle-class background, and after stints at the Courtauld and the Sorbonne, he landed, in 1937, the job of assistant keeper to Sir John Rothenstein at the Tate Gallery....
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In recent years there have been a number of exhibitions of Keith Vaughan’s work in commercial galleries, and his prices at auction have climbed steadily, but no major show in the nation’s museums. Yet interest in his life keeps pace with the revival in his art (the standard biography of Vaughan, by Malcolm Yorke, is long out of print and avidly sought after), and 2012 as the centenary of his birth will see the publication of a new monograph, a catalogue raisonné of his paintings and an annotated volume of his final journals. Vaughan was a good writer, and although...
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On 19 March, Adele’s 21 overtook Dark Side of the Moon to become the seventh bestselling album in British music history. A day or two later it caught Dire Straits’ Brothers In Arms napping, and eased into sixth place. So far 4.15 million copies have been sold. One in six British households has one. Ahead lie Thriller, (What’s The Story) Morning Glory?, Abba’s Gold, Sgt. Pepper and Queen’s Greatest Hits, still the daddy with 5.86 million registered sales.
These five have been the top five for so long that industry experts with sad goatees thought they would never be...
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Home cinema equipment isn’t only for the home; in fact, home may not be the best place for it. If you really want to see the effect of a good digital projector and a set of surround-sound speakers, put them in the back room of a pub.
An increasing number of publicans are doing so. There are at least four pub cinemas in my narrow slice of south London. They bring in regular custom on quiet nights, and can help landlords make good on the ferocious cost of their Sky Sports subscriptions. In the age of austerity and the £12...
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By the time you read this it’s quite likely I shall be in mid-air on my long journey to Australia. I’m off on a month-long speaking tour to promote Killing the Earth to Save It (the Oz version of Watermelons) and I figured my flight might work out cheaper if I arranged to be travelling on Friday the 13th. Should my plane blow up or the door come off at 30,000 feet causing me to be sucked out of the aircraft or I succumb to deep-vein thrombosis you’ll know I made the wrong call.
This will be the longest stretch...
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You might be thinking ‘Oh no’ as you listen to yet another trailer announcing the BBC’s latest Shakespeare season, designed to showcase England’s great playwright across radio and TV in this Olympics year. ‘Do we really need a 20-part series on Radio 4, scratching through the surprisingly few facts that are known for sure about the Bard, or even trying to evoke that faraway world in which men dressed in slashed-velvet bloomers and heretics were hung, drawn and quartered?’ Actually, we do, and especially when it’s written and presented by Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum.
Shakespeare’s Restless World,...
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