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Monday 7 July 2008

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Liz Anderson

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Roman souvenir

Laura Gascoigne

Wednesday, 13th February 2008

Laura Gascoigne follows in the footsteps of the 18th-century Grand Tourist

‘I was much disappointed in seeing Rome,’ complained the English traveller Sarah Bentham in the 1790s. ‘The streets are narrow, dirty and filthy. Even the palaces are a mixture of dirt and finery and intermixed with wretched mean houses. The largest open spaces in Rome are used for the sale of vegetables...’ The widowed stepmother of the philosopher Jeremy Bentham was equally underwhelmed by the Roman Campagna made famous by Claude. The city, she wrote, ‘appeared to be located in a desert’.

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A world elsewhere

Henrietta Bredin

Henrietta Bredin visits Oslo's new opera house and finds it impressive, both inside and out

Distinctly lacklustre

Andrew Lambirth

Radical light: Italy's Divisionist Painters 1891-1910
National Gallery, until 7 September, Sponsoered by Credit Suisse

What about the Iraqis?

Lloyd Evans

Black Watch
Barbican

Whatever Happened to Cotton Dress Girl?
New End

Divas
Apollo

Inspired and thrilling

Michael Tanner

Le nozze di Figaro
Royal Opera House

Here be monsters

Peter Hoskin

The Mist
15, Nationwide

Toffs are different

James Delingpole

Snowdon and Margaret: Inside a Royal Marriage (Channel 4)

Whisper or scream

Robin Holloway

Robin Holloway attends the Spanish premiere of Helmut Lachenmann's Little Match Girl

Plumed hats, rapiers and heaving bosoms

Gerald Warner

Gerald Warner celebrates the unexpected appearance of one last ‘swashbuckling novel’, and mourns the loss of a genre that taught boys honour, courage and chivalry

A long and happy life

Jason Goodwin

Jason Goowin reviews the memoirs of John Julius Norwich

De Gaulle understood that only nations are real

Robin Harris

Few may celebrate the half-century since Charles de Gaulle’s triumphs of 1958, says Robin Harris, but this realist genius understood that, in geopolitics, the nation-state was all