The artist Howard Hodgkin has been collecting Indian art since he was at Eton. For some years now his collection has been on loan to the Ashmolean, and a rotating selection of pictures from it are frequently on display. Yet to see all 100-plus works together is a revelation, as
Tag: Telegraph
(published in the Telegraph 27 Mar 2012) The rise and rise of Soho, London’s darkly alluring twilight zone In her fiction, Virginia Woolf transformed Soho into a menacing urban space filled with “fierce” light and “raw” voices, even as she privately commended herself for driving a good bargain on some
In Dickens’s bicentenary year, it is pleasant to remind ourselves that the 19th century did, in fact, produce authors other than “The Inimitable”, as Dickens (only partly joking) called himself. Ackroyd was an earlier worshipper at the Dickens shrine, his 1990 biography including dramatised imaginings of Ackroyd meeting his subject.
As The Old Curiosity Shop appeared in instalments, Charles Dickens was inundated with letters from readers, all begging him not to kill off Little Nell. Queen Victoria found Oliver Twist so “excessively interesting” that she pressed it on the prime minister, Lord Melbourne. It was this response, from high to
Edward Burne-Jones, Fiona MacCarthy’s “last” Pre-Raphaelite, might just be the most maddeningly elusive artist Britain has ever produced. He was a painter of the imagination, of the might-have-been, of the never-was, all dreamy maidens and sleeping beauties. And yet he was also a painter born into the Industrial Revolution, in