Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
The art journalist Laura Gascoigne wrote in 2007: It’s hard to imagine a more unlikely place for a James Ensor exhibition than the Lady Lever Art Gallery in Port Sunlight, the squeaky-clean temple to Edwardian taste in art founded by…
My first major discovery at the Getty was Portrait of Jeanne Kéfer (1885) by Fernand Khnopff. The second one was Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889 (1888) by James Ensor. “I must be in the wrong room,” I thought. “This…
In Paramount Pictures’ urbs in urbe on Melrose Avenue, there’s a section called New York City. Its facades, sidewalks and alleys serve as perfect props for scenes of American city life. The two doors on the right, once equipped with…
Sergei M. Soloviev, the great Russian historian, visited Brussels in 1842 (possibly 1843) as a young graduate of the Moscow University. He wrote of Belgium with great warmth: … and the cities – with their heroic medieval history, their blooming…
When France beat Belgium in the semifinals, it became obvious to me that France deserved to win the World Cup and would likely do it. Belgium had one of the best teams I’d ever seen, and yet they were completely…
President Trump claimed this at yesterday’s NATO summit: Germany is totally controlled by Russia because they will be getting from 60% to 70% of their energy from Russia and a new pipeline. I’m going to focus on the subordinate clause…
Not much of a soccer fan, sometimes I miss out on stories like this. Better late than never: Ilkay Gundogan [İlkay Gündoğan] of Manchester City and Mesut Ozil [Özil], a player for Arsenal London, triggered an uproar in Germany when…
When the Italian playwright Dario Fo was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1997, Andrew Gumbel wrote: Italy has not won the Nobel Prize since 1975, when the laureate was the undisputed master of 20th-century poetry, Eugenio Montale. In recent years,…
Kipling placed The Beginnings at the end of his 1917 miscellany, A Diversity of Creatures. To the reader, the poem might seem a postscript to the short story Mary Postgate, which is the next-to-last piece in the collection. The story…
There’s a Soviet joke – probably of Russo-Jewish origin like many Soviet jokes – that goes this way, approximately (the original Russian is grammatically imperfect): Let go of Daddy’s foot, kids, and stop swinging! He didn’t hang himself for this,…
Bob Seely, the conservative MP for the Isle of White, made these claims during a hearing on May 1: …Christopher Chandler is a public figure, owing to the Legatum Institute… According to the French security services… Mr Chandler is described…
Jill Dougherty, one of America’s most experienced foreign-affairs journalists, wrote last month: Russia is now “Fortress Russia,” with Putin as its defender, an image hammered home by state-owned media, a stance supported by some Russian voters smarting over what they…