Laura Knight at the Theatre Lowry Galleries, until 6 July Ascot racegoers whose binoculars wandered from the track in 1936 might have spotted something unusual in the car park: a Rolls-Royce with its back door open and an artist working at an easel inside. Odder still, the artist was a woman — Laura Knight —
To judge from the media coverage of Northern Rock, one might imagine that the circumstances of a bank collapse have never occurred before — or at least not for 150 years. But this is not the case. There have been several in recent years, including those of Johnson Matthey and Barings. But the closest parallel
In 1932 a young English art historian recently returned from his travels sent an enthusiastic article to The Spectator about a series of brand new murals he had seen in the courtyards of the Ministry of Education in Mexico City: All these paintings [he wrote] are conscious expositions of Communism. The ultimate object … is
‘Tenebrae’ is the last office, the final prayer in the ritual day of the Benedictine monk. But there is a double finality to the Tenebrae evoked at the beginning of this book. This is the great cathedral church of Durham, and the date is 31 December 1539. ‘A few hours earlier, the Prior of Durham
On the morning of Saturday 30 June 1860, the mutilated body of three-year Savill Kent was discovered in an outside privy at Road House, Wiltshire. The circumstances suggested that the murderer was almost certainly a member of the boy’s family or one of their servants. The case became something of a national obsession because of
Mike Leigh. Ground-breaking maverick or pretentious miseryguts? To ask the man himself isn’t perhaps the best way to secure an impartial verdict, but the personality that emerges in this series of interviews (composed with superb fluency by Amy Raphael) is an articulate, engaging, generous, highly original and occasionally peppery creative spirit. No British film-maker since
I must first declare an interest, now almost subliminal, in the subject of this vast, comprehensive, polymorphous and wholly captivating book. I was six when the war broke out and 12 when it ended. I read a lot of the books described new, as well as many more that were older. I remember the Magnet,
Scroll through the Multimap website to Bosworth Road, London W10, and it reveals that this sad corner of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea boasts three primary schools, two more schools and a college, all within a couple of hundred yards of each other. No need for any other seats of learning, you might
Attention Wire fans: if you haven’t done so already you should really make sure you read Peter Mosko’s new book, Cop in the Hood. Moskos, a Princeton and Harvard sociologist actually joined the Baltimore Police Department and spent more than a year patrolling in the city’s Eastern District ghetto (where much of The Wire was
Gordon Brown flies to Washington today (where, inter alia, he will have meetings with McCain, Clinton and Obama) so, naturally, this is the cue for fresh fretting over US-UK relations. Nile Gardner, currently exiled at the Heritage Foundation, duly volunteers for duty: Divine intervention might be required to improve the state of U.S.-UK relations, which
A splendid piece on elevators – yes, lifts – in this week’s New Yorker. Two things make tall buildings possible: the steel frame and the safety elevator. The elevator, underrated and overlooked, is to the city what paper is to reading and gunpowder is to war. Without the elevator, there would be no verticality, no
I hadn’t realised until Sallie James at Cato pointed me in the right direction that neither John McCain, nor Barack Obama nor Hillary Clinton voted on the (awful) 2007 Farm Bill. Well, I guess one can see why. Still, it would be nice to hear their answers to the questions: 1.Why didn’t you vote on
Mr Eugenides has a delightful item about everyone’s favourite “Viewspaper”, The Independent Matt Zeitlin points out a couple of elementary truths to the Weekly Standard It’s April 15th, so it’s time for Megan’s tax plan to get another airing. Stephen Colbert on the candidates. Plus! Who’s the real Irishman, Colbert or Bill O’Reilly? The wives
Can someone please give Gordon Brown a crash course in recent world history? “European leadership did not support President Bush in Iraq other than Britain and one or two other countries,” he tells CBS before his trip to the US . “I feel I can bring Europe and America closer together for the future.” Hmmm. Only
Today’s AFP dispatch from Basra makes for fascinating reading. It suggests that the Iraqi government efforts to rein in the militias that had come to dominate the town, thanks in part to British policy, has been much more successful than initially thought: “Residents say the streets have been cleared of gunmen, markets have reopened, basic
A brief addendum to today’s “Will Brown be deposed?” stories. Ninety percent of the respondents to this PoliticsHome poll think that Gordon Brown is an electoral liability for Labour. But the vast majority also believe he’ll still lead the party into the next election. Do Coffeehousers agree?
Take two: Gordon did better in his interview with the BBC today than in his exchange with Nick Robinson last week. As I wrote in the Sunday Telegraph, Brown answered Robinson’s questions in the earlier exchange about people’s anxieties over the economy without a shred of apparent empathy or feeling for worried mortgage holders and
If you feel like smashing your computer monitor in frustration, then head over to this Sky News story. The headline: “Brown: we’re getting economy right”. Yes, that’s the outrageous claim our Prime Minister made in an interview earlier today, adding that: “I am making the right long term decisions for our country”. It’s almost getting dull
Yet more talk of Brown’s potential demise. This time in today’s Standard – a story (not online) about how backbenchers are giving the Prime Minster until May 2009 to “improve or stand down” (quite how they’d force this through is another question…). Here’s what a “former minister” had to tell the paper: “I do not believe
Tory splits are rare nowadays, which is why it’s good to see Lord Forsyth talking sense about tax in the Telegraph today. It is “mad” for the Tories to propose to bring back the 10p starting rate of tax (which – in his seminal tax report (pdf) – he proposed to abolish long before Brown