The bee boy
On 12 December 1775 Gilbert White, the naturalist of Selborne in Hampshire, wrote a letter to his friend Daines Barrington in which he recalled a remarkable character who had lived in the village ‘more than twenty years ago’. He doesn’t name the lad, and just refers to him as ‘an idiot boy’. What made him […]
Francis Place at Coxwold
I’ve written before about Francis Place, late seventeenth century artist and potter, and about Coxwold in north Yorkshire. This piece brings the two together. Place was a landscapist ahead of his time, in vision (he anticipated the watercolour painters of the second half of the eighteenth century) and also in method (he walked for long […]
How to make an icon
The three of us were talking, as we strolled along the front at Porthcawl the other day, about modern icons. J. had just been for a return visit to Newcastle-upon-Tyne, so the Angel of the North in Gateshead soon came up in the conversation. Antony Gormley’s great weathered steel figure is over twenty-five years old, […]
Dros sbectol Keir Starmer
Beth yw rhodd neu anrheg? Gwrthrych neu wasanaeth y mae person yn ei gynnig i rywun arall, heb dâl. Nid yn unig heb dâl, ond hefyd heb ddisgwyl tâl neu gymwynas yn y dyfodol. Beth yw anrheg, gan unigolyn neu gwmni neu grŵp arall, i wleidydd? Yn syml, y gwrthwyneb: disgwyl y rhoddwr, bron bob […]
Van Gogh up close
The National Gallery is celebrating its 200th birthday with a very special exhibition. Surprisingly, it’s the first show it’s every mounted devoted to the paintings of Vincent Van Gogh. To be able to look at them intently and quietly, in the privileged conditions of a private view, is quite an experience. The exhibition is special […]
Is there a history of walking?
It’s a question that wouldn’t have been asked, let alone answered, before Rebecca Solnit’s pioneering book Wanderlust, published in 2000. Solnit is a writer probably best known for her books on women – she was the first to formulate the idea of ‘mansplaining’ – but her range of reference is startlingly wide, and her work […]
Blodau a breuddwydion
Cysur mawr, yn y cyfnod hwn o boen a galar, yw ymweld â Glenys yn ei thŷ yn y Mwmbwls â’i olwg digymar dros Fae Abertawe. Dyma ni’n dau’n cerdded lawr ’na amser coffi. Rownd bloc y teras, tu heibio i’r lotments yn haul y bore, trwy’r ardd gyda’i choeden palmwydd a’i cherflyn metal ar […]
Burying Lucy
Most visitors to Syracuse stick to Ortygia, the tear-shaped island that was the original site of the Greek colony, and Neapolis, with its large Greek theatre and sculptured caves. The Basilica di Santa Lucia is slightly off the beaten track, and few visitors were there last week. When you’ve been used to the elaborate Baroque […]
Three solitary figures in a landscape
1 Man on a mountain Caspar David Friedrich painted the work usually called The wanderer above the sea of fog in 1818. Though it found little fame at the time, it’s long been seen as the quintessence of German Romanticism in the visual arts. Friedrich was the mountain man of the early nineteenth century. Until […]
Walking across Afghanistan
There can’t be many more walks more extreme than the one described by Rory Stewart in his book The places in between. He takes us with him on a journey he made, entirely on foot, across the central regions of Afghanistan in 2002, from Herat to Kabul, soon after the US-led invasion of the country […]