Some things are defined by the absence or silence around them. In The Histories by US artist Kerry James Marshall at the Royal Academy, we enter a giant visual world occupied solely by black figures. They are not angry or sad. They are just ordinary people, working out who they are and what they are […]
The Artist of Black Beauty and Reality Read More »
This film about the Arab Revolt in Palestine in 1936 is unlikely to gain a mass audience, but it very much deserves to be seen. It’s a major work that dramatises events before the Second World War when Britain was still in charge of the territory. Following the Balfour Declaration of 1917, Jews were starting
How We Sowed the Seeds of the Middle East Conflict Read More »
On loops and containers Loops I have recently finished reading the second volume of Solvej Balle’s septology, On the Calculation of Volume(2025). Five volumes have been written with only the first two volumes translated into English; we await the translation of the third volume which is scheduled for 18th November 2025. The date is propitious.
On Loops and Containers Read More »
So what does it all mean – Grayson Perry’s Delusions of Grandeur at the Wallace Collection in London? On one hand, it proclaims that we have a licence to produce beautiful, bright things again. Art can be childish, it can be colourful and flamboyant, joyful and fantastic. On the other hand, we confront the original,
Sinister Beauty in Rococo Art Read More »
Erling Kagge is a Norwegian explorer, publisher and author, famous as the first explorer to conquer the three poles on foot: the North and South Poles and Mt. Everest. What makes his conquests all the more remarkable, is that all were unsupported. An appeal of this book is his examination of his own and his
Exploring the Ends of the Earth Read More »
(This follows on from the post on the book Crow) Ted Hughes was maybe the greatest English poet of his generation. But when he described Crow as his finest book, he was wrong. Its bleak philosophical message is unsubtle and the emotional register is passionate, extreme but two dimensional. Birthday Letters, published 28 years later,
Writing from the heart on human failure Read More »
The 1960s and 70s were a time of political and social upheaval in Britain. Under the governments of Harold Wilson, it seemed that power was edging ever closer to the people, but at the same time, radical politics was racing on further to the left. When I was a student at Oxford in the late
The Terrible Eye of Crow Read More »
“The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction…” “Sooner murder an infant in its cradle/ Than nurse unacted desires…” What are we to make of the visionary artist William Blake (1757-1827)? How we loved him in the 1960s and 70s, when he seemed to validate the revolt against traditional authority – and
The Many Meanings of William Blake Read More »
When I was invited to join the editorial team of “Just Beauty”, I had only recently seen the film “Conclave”, based on the Robert Harris novel of the same name, about the death of a pope and the election of a new one, and I was enthusing about it. I undertook to write a review
Why CONCLAVE is well worth seeing, even for a Humanist Read More »
I have just started to reread Jonathan Livingstone Seagull (Bach, 1970). Like many of my generation I read it when it was first published and was inspired by its message of rugged individuality, of being brave enough to go against the crowd and, of course, the sheer exuberance of flight whether real or metaphorical. The
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