Cars

Thursday

Melissa Kite

Real life: My handsome builder ex-boyfriend shows me how to buy a car

The sometime builder boyfriend spotted the Volvo on his way to a roofing job in Dorking. He rang me greatly excited. It had a few bumps and scratches but the pertinent facts were these: one owner. Never towed. A bike rack on the back. Haribo wrappers all over the seats. Oh, and the mark from an auction sticker still visible in the windscreen. ‘So it’s a mess,’ I said. ‘No,’ said the builder, who used to be a car dealer. ‘It’s a genuine family car that you can probably get cheap because it’s a bit dinged up. Trust me.’ The thing is, despite everything, all our stops and starts and

Thursday

Stephen Bayley

The Jaguar F-Type is no E-Type

In 1951, Arthur Drexler, an influential curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, organised an exhibition called 8 Automobiles. Drexler, who used to wear a bow tie, was one of the people who helped make ‘design’ the credible subject it is today. The press release said it was the ‘first exhibition anywhere of automobiles selected for design’ — as, indeed, it was. Eight fine cars were presented on a dramatic fake roadway with huge photographic enlargements of details as a backdrop. Drexler’s boss at the museum, the architect and one-time Nazi sympathiser Philip Johnson — and in those days New York’s arbiter elegantiarum — explained, ‘Automobiles are hollow, rolling