I have many favourite spots in the Lake District, but one stands out above the rest. I treasure Borrowdale, of course; the circuits to be made of Derwentwater, Loweswater and Buttermere; the gentle St John’s in the Vale; the secret lands to the north of Skiddaw (Back’o’Skiddaw); and beautiful Grisedale, which greets climbers descending fromRead More
It is good to be involved in a good thing. Last week, after years of development and the coming together of assorted initiatives, the British Library made one million pages from historic newspapers freely available online. Next year it will publish one million more, and million the year after that. At the same time rawRead More
The Game are ending. A strange summer Olympic Games, which many in Japan and elsewhere thought ought not to have taken place, given how Covid-19 is afflicting the people. Yet it did, and the moment it did so everything else disappeared, and all there was were people in contests against one another, participating in somethingRead More
So long as that woman from the Rijksmuseum in painted quiet and concentration keeps pouring milk day after day from the pitcher to the bowl the World hasn’t earned the world’s end. ‘Vermeer’ Poetry is everywhere. It is in the view framed by my window. It is in the cup from which I have justRead More
It’s a mad world out there. For too long there has been no escape into galleries, those places where disorder should dissolve and the eye focus on things that make sense. Elusively at times, but sense nonetheless. Now, in Britain at least, and for the time being at least, Covid-19 restrictions are retreating, letting galleriesRead More
At last, after a year and a half at least, I got to see a day’s professional cricket. Having played some games for Members only, Kent County Cricket Club opened up its doors to ordinary folk such as myself. We had to book ahead, we were allocated seats, and the necessary constraints were a bitRead More
It’s curious how a fine work of art immediately catches the eye. You walk through a gallery, and there is that picture at the far end whose ideal resolution of form and feeling stops all else except its contemplation. You pick up a book at random and on opening at any page a phrase isRead More
Back in my time working as a cataloguer at what was then called the National Film Archive, then the National Film and Television Archive, and is now the BFI National Archive, we used to produce shotlists for some of the films in the collection. They weren’t, strictly speaking, shotlists, since we cataloguers seldom described theRead More
It was on again the other night. In these days of DVD and streaming services it can seem hard to think of the film that is difficult to find – as films once were, aside from current releases, when you had to search long and far before tracking down that rarity of which you hadRead More
Napoleon never invaded Britain, but he left his mark on the country nonetheless. Britain had feared a French invasion for much of the eighteenth century, but those fears grew hugely when up-and-coming General Bonaparte was made head of France’s Armée d’Angleterre (Army of England) in 1797, with a brief to organise what had proven toRead More