Articles from the Autumn 2020 issue.
Still Life, Ciaran Carson, Wake Forest University Press, 2019, 88 pages LIAM GUILAR relishes - and mourns - a unique talent There’s a picture of Ciaran Carson on the back cover of Still Life. He’s sitting on a bench seat. Tall buildings, trees and streetlights provide a diminishing perspective taking the eye towards an approaching…
The Wilton Diptych SELBY WHITTINGHAM looks back on a life in the arts, from the New Elizabethans to Generation Z The latest bout of iconoclasm has produced renewed demands for a statue of Cecil Rhodes to be removed from a building built with his money at his and my alma mater, Oriel College, Oxford. The…
The Last Road, by Nina Marchenko Mr Jones, 2019, directed by Agnieszka Holland GUY WALKER admires an overdue film about a usually ignored atrocity This film deals with a real event – the ‘discovery’ and reporting by a Welsh journalist, Gareth Jones, of the Holodomor (man-made starvation) which took place in Soviet Ukraine in 1932-3.…
DEREK TURNER wanders in the West Country “Quite something, isn’t it?” the American woman asked, nodding towards Stonehenge. “However many pictures you see, it’s something to see it for real!” I didn’t disagree. As over-exposed as the Mona Lisa, emblazoned on a billion brochures, co-opted into countless works of counter-culture, and passed by an often…
Doctor Dee and Edward Kelly raising the dead MICHAEL WILDING tells the extraordinary story of the councillor, the charlatan, and the crowned heads of Europe In 1582, Dr John Dee advertised for an assistant. A mathematician of considerable reputation in England and in Europe, he was regularly consulted by powerful statesmen such as Lord Burghley,…
Visitors to Yadegar Asisi's 'Dresden 1945' installation at the Panometer in Dresden in January 2015 Dresden, the Fire and the Darkness, Sinclair McKay, Viking, 2020 LESLIE JONES revisits the Dresden raid of February 1945 “Man is at bottom a savage, horrible beast” (Arthur Schopenhauer) Historian James Holland, a ubiquitous presence on television programmes about World…
Flooded Modernity - installation by Danish artist Asmund Havesteen-Mikkelsen (a replica of Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye) PETER KING finds some household technologies turn security into anxiety, and convenience into control The modernist architect going by the name Le Corbusier famously described the house as “a machine for living in”. This view was very much associated…
Rites of Dionysus, by Tim Shaw MARK GULLICK says the hyperbolised decade turned naivety into nastiness “They’re selling hippie wigs in Woolworths, man. We’re at the end of the greatest decade in the history of mankind, and as Presumin’ Ed has so consistently pointed out, we have failed to paint it black.” Withnail and I…
Cassandra by A. F. Sandys (1829-1904) Small Men on the Wrong Side of History – The Decline, Fall, and Unlikely Return of Conservatism, Ed West, London, Constable, 2020, 426 pages DEREK TURNER likes a conservative critique of conservatism The story of conservatism since 1945 has been one of failure wrapped up in frequent electoral success.…
Cape Cod MARK PATTON traces cultural, ecological and personal histories on Cape Cod I have lived on Cape Cod for 53 years. During much of this time, I served as the Falmouth and Woods Hole area’s director of Natural Resources. My other jobs included helmsman on the research vessel Chain, enforcement officer for the U.S.…