Alec Marsh

In the winner-takes-all world of modern art, there’s every chance you might not have heard of Cedric Morris. Why should you? No matter how much you sweeten the tea, the Welshman, born in 1889, was no Pablo Picasso, Mark Rothko or Salvador Dali. Nor from our 21st-century outlook can it be said that the name

Nothing in life prepares you for the school run. In theory, on paper, it ought to be idyllic. What could be better than feeding a nutritious breakfast to your nine- and five-year-old, before scrubbing their cherubic upturned faces and combing down their buoyant hair, and then helping them get dressed and out to the car

With reluctance – but enticed by its surprisingly starry cast and the fact that it had landed, ironically enough, on Netflix – I recently tuned in to The Hour, the BBC’s 2011 political drama series. It’s about a BBC TV news programme being launched in 1956, against the backdrop of the Suez Crisis. And, goodness

Britain’s public loos are a national embarrassment. If you are in any doubt, head to Liverpool Street Station and spend a penny. It’s unquestionably the most odious and unpleasant public lavatory anywhere in the supposedly civilised world. It has to be experienced to be believed, but suffice it to say that the level of cleanliness on

You will be aware that we face a national emergency. I’m not referring to the fact that our closest ally has seemingly taken leave of its senses or the astonishing news that apparently one in four Britons is now disabled – nor that more than nine million of us of working age are economically inactive.

When did you last bump into the words ‘Made in Britain’ on a jumper, shirt or pair of trousers? There’s a chance, if you’re under 40, that you’ve never actually seen those words printed in an item of clothing – ever. And that’s quite a problem, particularly when you consider that we find ourselves in

You will doubtless have read the news and possibly even an obituary of Group Captain John ‘Paddy’ Hemingway, the last of ‘the Few’, who died this week at the great age of 105. That he lived beyond the age of 21 is little short of miraculous, of course – given that he was shot down

Nowadays whenever an elderly celebrity dies – consider the death last month of Gene Hackman as a case in point – one of the first things that happens is that a chunky clip of them appearing on a talk show such as Wogan or Parkinson gets shared on social media. Before you know it, you’ve

Browse the website of the Independent Schools Council (ISC), which represents some 1,400 schools teaching around 500,000 children, and it will tell you there are 26,195 overseas pupils at its UK member schools. They make up 4.7 per cent of the total student population. The cosy percentages belie the truth. For rather like the growing

There was a time when the word ‘toxic’ was applied in only a handful of circumstances. There was the stuff that occasionally oozed out of a power station into the North Sea and made the fish go funny. Or there was the substance that Christopher Lloyd would stick in the gull-wing doored DeLorean to make

In a world of bewildering uncertainty and breakneck change, where a pack of butter now costs about the same as a small family saloon in the 1950s, there is at last some good news to cheer the soul. It concerns the lobster, that culinarily appealing crustacean which has sustained us nutritionally since the Stone Age

The first months of the year are a tough time to inhabit this corner of the planet. First there’s January to contend with – darker than Himmler’s sock drawer and full to the rafters with post-festive self-flagellation. Then we’re into February, which is just more of the same: January by another name. No wonder the powers-that-be

‘Centrist dad’, a term that has been with us for a decade or so, has never exactly been a compliment. In 2017, even Tony Blair – then still pretty close to being political toxic waste – disavowed the label, declaring: ‘I’m not a centrist dad.’ In that same year a chap named Matt Zarb-Cousin, a

How many people under 40 in Britain today do you think have read H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines? Five, six… 50? It’s hard to know. If you’re lucky – or unlucky, depending on your point of view – you might have bumped into the 1985 film version with Richard Chamberlain, Sharon Stone and Herbert

Any moment now it will begin – and then it won’t stop for a month. Because as we enter the new year, the twin horsemen of the joyless apocalypse – the anti-booze and anti-meat lobby – pounce upon the January blues like a starved dog on the Christmas leftovers. And they are merciless. Give up

Have you been to York? Have you sauntered along its narrow, meandering medieval streets, with their peculiar names – such as Swinegate, Lendal, Ogleforth, or Fossgate – that evoke a pre-modern age? Have you strolled up Museum Street, passing medieval walls and imposing crenellated stone gateways – known as bars for some reason, where severed

You approach the pier at Clacton-on-Sea by passing under an elegant bridge, one which in Venice you would probably stop to admire. But this is Essex and the stonework is emblazoned with the town’s coat of arms and motto, Lux, salubritas et felicitas – light, health and happiness. Here you can admire the turning blades

It began after pint of beer on a Friday evening and a grudging realisation that, well, getting a little bit more active would be no bad thing. Before I knew it, I’d talked myself into doing a 60-mile cycle through the Essex countryside the following Sunday morning – part of an organised cycle race, charmingly called

The company that makes the world-renowned Swiss Army penknife has decided to introduce a range of penknives that come… wait for it… without knives – citing increased regulations ‘due to the violence in the world’. It isn’t the knives that need changing, but rather the poorly-applied laws The problem is that a Swiss Army penknife without

Researchers at the Humboldt University of Berlin have discovered that we no longer consider ourselves old until we’re 74. What’s more, by the time you reach 74, you think old age begins at 77. Which is something to celebrate – just don’t tell the Department for Work and Pensions or they’ll get more bright ideas about pushing