Subterms
On the night of 30 May 1942, Air Marshal Arthur Harris, Commander-in-Chief of Royal Air Force Bomber Command, launched the first of his 1,000-bomber raids on Nazi Germany. The target was the ancient city of Cologne. By the following morning a sixth of the city’s homes were damaged or destroyed. But this terrifying raid was […] More
The photographer met with Gandhi just hours before his assassination – and recorded an event that shook the world More
This spring, the collection of the Royal Photographic Society (RPS) was transferred from the National Media Museum in Bradford to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. When news of the move was announced in 2016, there was a good deal of criticism, including a letter to the Guardian signed by a long list of […] More
Wentworth Woodhouse in Yorkshire, the longest if not the largest country house in England, has been a problem ever since the late Manny Shinwell, Attlee’s Minister of fuel and power, in a one-sided skirmish in the class war, ordered its park to be dug up for open-cast coal mining shortly after the Second World War. […] More
In 1874, the year before he died, the architect Alexander Thomson delivered a series of public lectures on the history of architecture. His Glasgow audience must have been surprised at some of his observations. ‘Philosophers,’ he told them, ‘in explaining the nature of light and endeavouring to give us some idea of the rate at […] More
A town that has, in its centre, a street called the Land of Green Ginger surely cannot fail to be interesting, but this intriguing name is nowhere near as old as the much bombed and much abused city of Hull itself. Properly called Kingston upon Hull since the reign of Edward I, and situated where the […] More
In May 1968, as students rampaged through the streets of Paris, a rather more positive cultural event took place some 30 kilometres to the southwest. Vaux-le-Vicomte, the great 17th-century chateau, the precursor of Versailles, set in its magnificent formal garden, was fully opened to the public for the first time. Given that there is no […] More
A century ago, in the summer of 1915, the Victoria & Albert Museum mounted an exhibition of the work of a living artist for the first time. This was the sculptor Ivan Mestrovic (1883–1962), to whom two whole galleries were devoted in a display designed by the English architect Charles Holden (who had already collaborated […] More
