Junk, day and night
Travelling the 400 miles from Glasgow to London recently, Theodore Dalrymple noticed that the roadside was littered with food and drink packaging, flapping in the wind like Buddhist prayer flags. Roads...
View ArticleAn indispensable guide
It is 60 years since Nikolaus Pevsner published Middlesex, the first in ‘The Buildings of England’ series. It is 60 years since Nikolaus Pevsner published Middlesex, the first in ‘The Buildings of...
View ArticleRemembering well
Extraordinary how potent cheap drama is. The latest season of Downton Abbey, which ended on Sunday, pulled off a rare double in its interpretation of the first world war — making you laugh one second...
View ArticleHarry Mount
At last, 18 years after leaving university, the call comes to appear on the University Challenge Christmas Special. A wonderful boost for my intellectual vanity. Not so good for the physical sort....
View ArticleTravel – Norway: Northern light
In the constant light of summer, Tromsø is an extraordinarily civilised place from which to visit the wilderness, discovers Harry Mount ‘Why do the British look so ill?’ I was asked by a 23-year-old...
View ArticleContinental drift
Why did Florence become a hotspot for Americans in the late 19th and early 20th century? Henry James, Edith Wharton, John Singer Sargent and a gang of other American artists and writers descended on...
View ArticleA sporting life
If you wanted a little more excitement in this year’s Olympic marathon, you could do worse than imitate the race in 1908 — the first time the Games were held in London. Competitors, running from...
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Less Muck, more Brass
Staying near Zutphen, Holland, recently, I came across a remarkably untidy Dutch farmer. With his ripped silage bags and rusty agricultural machinery cluttering up the farmyard, he was known as der...
View ArticleThis sheltered isle
This rainy weather has occasionally softened my rock-hard cynicism about climate change. I have bicycled around London for 25 years — and I usually get drenched about half a dozen times a year. This...
View ArticleBuilding on the past
London was an industrial city until remarkably recently. It seems extraordinary now, but Bankside Power Station was built in 1947, by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, to burn oil right on the banks of the...
View ArticleRural idol
Ronald Blythe, our greatest rural writer, remembers sheep being driven through Lavenham, the Suffolk wool town, before the war. Now he’s lived long enough to see the same street filled with Japanese...
View ArticleThe hate of the new
The title of the new show at the Palazzo Strozzi is a little confusing. Most of the artists in Italy in the 1930s weren’t beyond fascism; they were in it up to their necks. They didn’t really need much...
View ArticleFollowing In The Fitzgeralds’ Footsteps
Stand on the north shore of Long Island, in the little town of Great Neck, and — with a little imagination and a few Martinis — you drift right back to the world of The Great Gatsby. Great Neck, 15...
View ArticleThe home-wreckers
Now that his old arch-enemy, Boris Berezovsky, has bitten the dust, Roman Abramovich can devote his full attention to another bête noire — London’s terraced houses. In his £10 million plan to knock...
View ArticleGoing Dutch
Hallelujah! The minimalist fashion for dreary acres of white walls is coming to an end. During the long decade that the Rijksmuseum has been closed — it was only supposed to be shut for three years —...
View ArticleSublime beauty
Sixty per cent of the best Renaissance art is said to be in Italy, and half of that is in Florence. So why bother going to Florence for a particular Renaissance sculpture exhibition when there’s huge...
View ArticleHarry Mount
At evensong in Trinity College, Cambridge last Sunday, Ann Widdecombe was preaching. The pews were packed, with many in the congregation bagging seats half an hour before the service began. ‘Strictly...
View ArticleHoughton revisited
When the Marquess of Cholmondeley inherited Houghton Hall, the Palladian palace by Colen Campbell and James Gibbs, he started rootling through the cupboards and drawers. In one drawer, he found a...
View ArticleAgainst the law
Shakespeare took it a little far in Henry IV, Part II, when Dick the Butcher said, ‘Let’s kill all the lawyers.’ Chris Grayling hasn’t made the same proposal but you could be forgiven for thinking...
View ArticleThe essential vade-mecum
After Zorba the Greek, here comes Horace the Roman. The peasant Zorba, you’ll remember from the film, releases uptight, genteel Alan Bates from his cage of repressed Englishness. Now it’s Horace, the...
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