Imagine the sound of a bluebell wood.
If the bluebells were bells.
Category Archives: Places of Interest
Back to Oxford
A few weeks ago I went to Oxford (again!) for the day to see the Oxford Literary Festival in full swing.
Constable Exhibition at The Lightbox
‘Painting is with me but another word for feeling’.
So John Constable told Archdeacon John Fisher in a letter in October 1821. If you visit the latest exhibition at The Lightbox in Woking, you will be able to see Constable’s innermost clandestine feelings expressed on the walls of the gallery.
Constable was one of the first artists of the Romantic Movement to view landscapes for their own beauty, rather than as a backdrop for a historical scene. He created his art directly from nature rather than from his imagination and he resisted the fashion of the day to piece together elements taken from nature to form a classical landscape.
Oxford on a Sunday Morning
I spent a free Sunday morning in fascinated wandering through the city of Oxford.
Thankfully the sun came out too!
Spring at RHS Wisley
A walk round RHS Wisley has the unerring ability to fill me with the hope that spring is the season du jour.
A Day in the Bath
‘Vogue 100’ at the National Portrait Gallery
Evelyn Waugh looks, frankly, like he’s just read a line from one of his own books in the silent section of the library, and is relying on his bracing hands on his knees to give him the strength necessary to resist the inevitable eruption of giggles from within. Waugh’s gaze seems past us, slightly over our shoulders, in Irving Penn’s square photograph from 1952. His thick wool suit is more creased than his forehead, near where the top of the photograph ends.
Snowdon’s verbose (can we use that word to describe an image?) photograph of Salman Rushdie in his London home shortly after he won the Booker Prize for Midnight’s Children shows Rushdie in a Windsor chair in the corner of the room, head turned towards us, chin in his hand, bathetic.
Continue reading ‘Vogue 100’ at the National Portrait Gallery
Fortnum & Mason, London
I was pulled by a sheer magnetism of love into Fortnum & Mason.
And went for a spin around the food hall.
Painting the Modern Garden at the Royal Academy
It felt like Monet’s water lilies took my stare and enclosed it tightly in their gentle, pink, waxy clutches.
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Catullus’ Bedspread Daisy Dunn Book Launch
There was an excitable buzz last night at the launch of Daisy Dunn’s debut books: Catullus’ Bedspread: The Life of Rome’s Most Erotic Poet and The Poems of Catullus, at Peter Harrington Rare Books in Dover Street, Mayfair.
Among the 200+ guests pounding the shop’s floor were Ian and Victoria Hislop, Sir Simon Jenkins, Hannah Kaye, Mike Grady, Hugo Williams, Giles Milton, Suzannah Lipscomb, Michael Cockerell, Gordon Corera, Thane Prince…