Subterms
The homes of great men and women can sometimes tell us much more than words. Over the last two centuries, many have been deliberately preserved and have become shrines, open to the public and to worshippers. Above all, writers and poets have enjoyed this treatment, what with Burns’s cottage, Walter Scott’s Abbotsford, the ‘birthplace’ of […] More
Sandycombe Lodge, built by J.M.W. Turner in Twickenham in 1812, offers an intriguing glimpse of the painter’s potential as an architect. It reopens to the public on 19 July 2017 following a major restoration project overseen by Turner’s House Trust. Writing for Apollo in December 2012, Gavin Stamp outlined the history of the building as […] More
Bringing together over 300 images, the Irving Penn centennial exhibition at the Met offers a dizzying run through the long arc of Penn’s career. The photographs include Penn’s earliest quasi-touristic photos of various signs and street scenes; vibrant still lives; his fashion photographs from the 1940s through the 1990s; endless portraits (the most notable of […] More
England’s ancient cathedrals are in serious financial trouble, so much so that there is talk of some of them closing their doors (and being allowed to fall down?). The crisis is such that a Cathedrals Working Group has been set up to review the governance and financial management of the nation’s 42 Anglican cathedrals. Huge, […] More
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
