For a hundred years or so, the director of the Tate Gallery has normally been a major figure in the art world. Sir Norman Reid, director in a dynamic period between 1964 and 1979, increased the Tate’s exhibition space and acquired, for example, an important group of paintings by Mark Rothko. Sir Alan Bowness (1980–8)
Canaletto is one of the best-loved of foreigners who visited these shores and attempted to capture the English spirit through depictions of our countryside and buildings. London was the magnet, inevitably, when commissions began to run short in his native Venice. Canaletto had sold a great deal of work to the English aristocracy as they
Back in November, I wrote about the sad death of my old VW Passat on the way down to Dorset. It was gloomily pronounced on all sides to be irreparable, and the poor old thing languished in the car park outside Netherbury Village Hall before Andy, the local garage man, managed to dispose of it
The Royal Opera’s new Carmen, which opened last month, is back with different singers in all the most important roles. The balance among the principals has changed and, rather surprisingly, though Carmen is now clearly the central figure, as she wasn’t in the first run, that hasn’t turned out to the benefit of the show
Notes on a Scandal is a fairly nasty book and this is a fairly nasty film — very Patricia Highsmithian is the nearest I can get to it — but this does not mean you should deny yourselves the very great pleasure of it. In fact, don’t, unless you aren’t keen on seeing Dame Judi
I caught The Antiques Roadshow (BBC1, Sunday) almost by accident the other day. It was one of those moments when you’re too lazy to turn the television off, you flip through the numbers on the remote, and there it is. Comfort viewing for Sunday evenings. It is 28 years old now, almost an antique itself.
