Tag: refugees
Castle of light
Barmouth and utopia make an unlikely combination. But for a brief period the town, best known for its donkeys, candy-floss and Brummies, was the home of an idealistic social experiment, and an historic act of generosity. Fanny Talbot was born in Somerset in 1824, the youngest daughter of John and Mary Bowne. Her father was […]
Swansea and Chile: exploitation, sanctuary, fulfilment
The Glynn Vivian has a show of work from its collection on the theme ‘art and industry’. It’s full of wonderful and thought-provoking things: well-known paintings as well as much less familiar items on paper and in other media. A whole wall is taken up with Josef Herman’s massive ‘Miners’ oil painting of 1951, surely […]
Plague: a Martian sends a postcard home
My dearest brothers and sisters Five years have passed since I wrote to you about my last visit to Earth. You will remember that I ended my report by counselling you not to send me on a third mission to that hapless planet, or at least to that insignificant part of it known as the […]
Gerhard Bersu and ‘hostile environments’
As I was wandering round the Manx Museum in Douglas last week – it’s a first-class museum with imaginative displays and zero dumbing-down – a name sprang out of one of the panels in the section on Manx prehistory that took me straight back to my student archaeology days. The name was that of Gerhard […]
London: scene of flight, scene of destruction
Fleeing from the noise and heat of the midday traffic we took our sandwiches to a bench in a small public garden off Marylebone High Street. What we’d chanced upon was the site of the old St Marylebone church, across the road from its 1817 replacement. Nothing remains of the first three churches (the current […]