For the last few months of his life, the Dutch painter Vincent Van Gogh lived in the French village of Auvers-sur-Oise. He had been discharged from the clinic at Saint-Rémy where he had been treated for mental disorder, moving to Auvers to be near to local doctor Paul Gachet and his brother Theo, resident inRead More
When you step into the Musée Albert-Kahn, one of the most beautiful and extraordinary places in the whole of Paris, a notice on the wall speaks out to you in French and English: Je ne vous demande qu’une chose, c’est d’avoir les yeux grands ouverts I only ask one thing of you: keep your eyesRead More
I do not expect hotels to be exceptional. I want them simply to be functional, a comfortable base from which to explore. The luxury hotel, by that measure, is a nonsense, because it could be anywhere. You must want to get out of your hotel as much as you hope to like staying in it.Read More
It is time, once more, for me to rearrange my books. A visit to a couple of second-hand bookshops resulted in a bagful of titles to add to the collection, and such is the tight squeeze on some of the shelves that I need a rethink. Space must be created at more than one pointRead More
I once appeared on stage with Sir Ian McKellen. It was not one of my greater moments in the spotlight. It came about late in 1994 (I forget the exact date), when I was in the middle of programming a long season of Shakespeare-related films at the National Film Theatre. One of them was aRead More
To Margate on a grey summer’s day, to the Turner Contemporary, which always has something interesting to show, occasionally exhilaratingly so. And so it was this time. The exhibition was of works by American Abstract Expressionist Ed Clark (1926-2019), of whom I knew nothing until now. Over four rooms, with a fifth devoted to aRead More
Bob Dylan is an artist I hugely admire. I always have done. But no artist can be excellent all of the time and a good many of those who have enjoyed a long career have produced much that is average and a fair amount of that which is terrible. William Wordsworth, having written sublime poetryRead More
Let’s go to the Hay Festival. Three days of books and people, just over the border into Wales. Well, I’d not been to the Festival before now, for all its fame, and it’s been too long since I visited the book town that gave the world book towns. Staying just outside Hereford. A so-so townRead More
There is no time for complacency, the next attack on knowledge is about to happen. Richard Ovenden, Burning the Books (2020) The British Library has been a news story of late, and not a happy one. On 28 October 2023 the Library fell victim to a cyber-attack. A criminal group named Rhysida infiltrated the Library’sRead More
‘I saw them play.’ Those are precious words to be said of any notable sporting figure, that you played your part in making them great because you were there in the crowd, witness to their exceptionalism. So I saw Derek Underwood play, the Kent and England left-arm spinner, who died aged seventy-eight on 15 AprilRead More