Indholdsfortegnelse for April 2025 i The Critic

BRITISH FARMING IS A PECULIAR BUSINESS. Rarely does one farm enterprise feel they are in direct competition with another. Naturally, discourse and occasional hostility does occur between agrarian neighbours. Altercations over boundaries, straying livestock or even whose bull has the most potent semen are a norm. Yet on the whole these quarrels are all part and parcel of rural life. When it comes down to the nitty-gritty of business, British farmers largely operate with a mien of collaborative shared endeavour, quite unlike the cut-throat rivalries seen in sectors such as manufacturing, finance or utilities. History helps to explain this happy state of mind. British farmers being endowed with the spirit of “we’re in this together” is well evidenced. The farming cooperative movement first emerged in the UK, with the Rochdale…

THIS IS A STORY ABOUT TIME TRAVEL. IN BATTERSEA. I went to visit one of the last survivors of the “sixties”, a cultural commodity, possibly now an antique commodity, not a mere ten calendar years. He is George Ciancimino, aged 97. I have known him very slightly for a long time. Elegant, affable, tanned, confident, relaxed, garrulous, but also quietly insistent in a charming way. And difficult to define. I think he makes it so. On my way, walking through the park, I thought in a stream-of-consciousness way about the decade he survived. Time magazine’s “Swinging London” article was published in April 1966 and sanctified the era and its ways, although Diana Vreeland had declared London to be swinging in US Vogue the year before. Perhaps Vreeland had visited Dolly’s…

ADA PALMER HAS WRITTEN A BIG BOOK.It is unique in character, bewildering in structure, packed with learning, and replete with anecdote. At times it is charming, at times annoying, but the end result is an important achievement for our fallen age. To reassess the Renaissance is a daunting prospect. Leaving aside the sheer temporal, spatial, cultural, political and intellectual breadth of the movement claiming that name — a good quarter-millennium of headspinning innovation, reinvention and reformation — the Renaissance phenomenon can only be comprehended by playing both the Colossus and the Janus. Straddling the period in a painful stretch, the historian must at once look back to Greco-Roman antiquity and survey the long stretch in between — now perforce the “Middle Ages” — while also looking forward to the incalculable…

IT ALMOST FEELS LIKE AN IMPERTINENCE TO review Quentin Skinner’s latest book. The doyen of what is now known as the Cambridge School of the history of political thought, he is one of the few academics to become a legend in their own time. Not content to rest on his laurels, Skinner has now published Liberty as Independence, a book of fantastic depth and breadth, full of good learning and effortless erudition, which is sure to become an instant classic. Skinner’s thesis, which is relatively straightforward by the standards of the discipline, is that during the late eighteenth century, there was a major shift in the anglophone understanding of liberty, away from “liberty as independence”, meaning freedom from arbitrary power and the ability to act according to one’s autonomous will, and…

MONDAY 28 JUNE, 1813. THIRTY-two guests dine around a table to celebrate the King’s birthday at the Royal Academy. The first course — probably turtle soup — is served, champagne flutes refilled. Two glasses clinked together would be those of Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851) and John Constable (1776-1837). Sat side by side, these would-be giants of British art had their inaugural meeting orchestrated by fate, in the form of a seating plan. Speculation about the dinner party conversation is one facet of Turner and Constable: Art, Life, Landscape. Art historian and curator Nicola Moorby fuses diverse perspectives in order to preserve the thrill of hagiography without sacrificing integrity to sensationalist accounts. Early in the book, she declares her aim to give more nuance to binary accounts of two artists…

THE DOWNSIDE FOR A WRITER OF A SUCcessful debut novel is the subsequent need to do their growing up in public. Fifty years ago, Martin Amis followed scabrous but fitfully brilliant The Rachel Papers with the scabrous but largely terrible Dead Babies. Twenty-five years ago, Zadie Smith made a big splash with White Teeth, and then gave us the freakishly flat The Autograph Man. Natasha Brown’s first novel Assembly was one of the sensations of 2021, a sharp story, splintered into shards, of a young Oxbridge-educated black woman’s great refusal of society, complete with shocking ending. This magazine called it “slim, stark, effective”, and we were not alone. So Brown’s follow-up carries expectations. Universality, at 150 pages, doesn’t seem like much for four years’ work, but size isn’t everything. It…

A WEEK AFTER DONALD J. TRUMP declared himself president of the John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts, a bomb threat was received. The building was evacuated, searched and pronounced safe. Minor incident, they said. Some crackpot offering to blow up the Center was no big deal once the president had already done just that. Democracy has a long-standing consensus that serving politicians don’t get hands-on with the arts. Maybe Trump didn’t know that when he sacked the KenCen chairman David Rubenstein and the board, followed by CEO Deborah Rutter. Rubenstein, a business pal of Trump’s, had pumped a hundred million dollars into the Center. Rutter raised fifty million more each year. Where the next donors will come from is unclear. Trump is not a patron of the arts, nor…

BACK IN 2010 I WAS REPORTING from a former Tsarist barracks that had been turned into a highly classified NATO military base. Estonia, one of the world’s most wired countries, was a natural choice to host the West’s cyber-defence hub — especially as it had been hit by a serious cyber-attack a few years earlier. There was a whole new vocabulary to learn, with terms such as “drive-by-download”, a malicious programme installed when a link is clicked on, “sandbox”, a secure space on a drive to investigate suspicious software and “zero day”, a software vulnerability that is unknown to the developer and has no patch to fix it. Zero Day is the apt title of Netflix’s timely and highly entertaining new political conspiracy drama. Thousands have been killed across the…

ON BOXING DAY LAST YEAR, WE WENT on a family expedition to visit Bataville, the 1930s Czech village which exists surreally off the main road to Southend-on-Sea, as if it was the very first piece of land that Thomas Bata found when he was flying from Prague to London looking for somewhere to locate a new shoe factory. After an excursion to see, but not to eat in, a modernist café, the only building ever designed by Ove Arup, on the seafront on Canvey Island (I don’t recommend it), we decided to drive back by way of Brentwood Cathedral, which in 2022 was listed Grade 2*, an unusual inclusion among recent listed buildings in that it is determinedly classical, designed by Quinlan Terry, a hero to the latter-day neo-classicists including…

THE AUSTRO-HUNGARIAN empire had its own internal wine economy. The most famous was Tokaji, the great sweet wine that is still made in Hungary and on a much smaller scale in Slovakia. But, according to the wine-loving historian Giles MacDonogh, there were other high quality sweet wines made across the empire, including some notable ones from Romania. The champagne mentioned in books such as Beware of Pity by Stefan Zweig would almost certainly have been Austrian; there had been a thriving sparkling wine industry based around Wachau since the mid-nineteenth century. There were also renowned dry whites from the Sud Tyrol, now in Italy, and Chardonnay planted in modern day Slovenia to make something a bit like white Burgundy. But what about red Burgundy? Was there a kaiserlich und königlich…

LAST WEEK, AT THE Betsey Trotwood, in Farringdon, my brilliant and wonderfully camp friend, Tommy, leant across the table and asked in a hushed tone if I’d noticed that “there has been something of a vibe shift?” What he meant, he went on, is that the teenagers he teaches Classics to (at one of London’s most academic schools) have all of a sudden started wearing knitwear and are reading Evelyn Waugh. He even had a boy tell him recently that although he is probably best described as “Battersea Jewish” by birth, he has started to identify as Anglo-Catholic. Tommy told him that such are the times we live in, you can identify however you like. At Christmas, I caught another friend, a long-time vegan zealot, with their finger in a…

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A WESTMINSTER WAG once remarked that British political scandals are different because they so often consist of nothing more than the public noticing what is already in the public domain. Outsourcing your wardrobe needs to Lord Alli was entirely within the rules, and since it was all declared on Parliament’s website what was all the fuss about? Now it is the turn of the Sentencing Council to learn the same lesson. The quango recently released draft guidelines which state that a pre-sentence report, which often leads to a shorter sentence, will “normally be considered necessary” if the offender belongs to an ethnic or religious minority. The binding guidelines must be followed by all judges “unless the court is satisfied that it would be contrary to the interests of justice to…

A YEAR AGO I WROTE HERE [Let the blood-letting begin, April 2024] that what mattered for the Right was who got blamed for the pending Tory defeat. I admit that predicting this looming election loss was foresight on the level of people who are smug about having foretold that a party led by Nigel Farage would split if it had two or more members. But how has the narrative-framing gone? “The Tory party is going nowhere: it won’t be killed and it won’t be replaced” I wrote. Yet all this year personality after personality has slouched towards Tufton Street and said to me, “it’s done. They’re going to beat us at the next election”. Cabinet members who had lost their seats, aspirant Tory MPs, think tankers, hacks, fellow-travellers, academics, sitting…

AS THE FAILURE OF BRITAIN’S MASS migration experiment becomes more apparent by the day, proponents of a “values-based” national identity look increasingly outdated. According to commentators such as Fraser Nelson, “Britishness” is about nothing more than subscription to a handful of loose, propositional values — tolerance, pluralism, democracy. Buy into these simple ideas, and anybody can become British, or so we are told. But if that’s the aim of a loose, propositional national identity, it doesn’t appear to have been very successful. Far from representing an “integration miracle”, British society appears hopelessly divided, with different ethnic and religious groups advocating for their own interests and their own special institutions. Nor does it seem descriptively accurate, as these modish “values” do nothing to distinguish us from our European neighbours and would…

WHEN DAVID LODGE TRIED TO SELL HIS BREAKTHROUGH NOVEL CHANGING PLACES TO ANAmerican publisher, it was roundly rejected — 17 times — with one senior editor describing the book as “a very funny and lively example of a genre of English novel that is pure hell to do anything with here”. If this was a “surprise and disappointment” to the writer — who died in January, just shy of his ninetieth birthday — it was an apt enough outcome for a comic novel about cultural differences between Britain and America. For while Lodge evidently couldn’t get arrested across the pond, in this country he was — in a long prime that ran from the 1970s to the 1990s — a kind of literary common currency. His achievement was to appeal to almost…

MY WIFE ORDERED A FEW PRINTED LABELS ONLINE AND THEY arrived a week later through the post. I have known election propaganda less hectoring than the envelope in which they came. “Our packaging is now plastic-free,” it said, of course in green lettering, though not too brightly green. This was more olive than apple in colour; the latter might have suggested chemical dyes. “Even this [envelope] window is plasticless,” it said. Furthermore, the envelope was of “100% recycled and recyclable paper,” certified by an organisation called Blue Angel. “100% plastic-free,” it reiterated. The company that sent it was a ClimatePartner-certified company. “Carbon dioxide: measure, reduce, contribute,” it said, I presume in the sense of reduced rather than additional contribution. And the envelope also said, “100% renewable energy,” though what exactly this…

EARLY IN JANUARY, BEFORE HIS ILL-JUDGED remarks at the annual Holocaust Memorial Day in Dublin introduced Gaza into the day’s mourning, the president of the Irish Republic welcomed young Irish scientists to an exhibition in Dublin by subjecting them to his political grievances. Michael Higgins referred to “the recent appalling comments from NATO calling for ever more armaments expenditure to be achieved” and rounded on NATO chief, Mark Rutte. That the officially neutral republic is not a member of NATO may give Higgins theoretical licence to snipe from the sidelines, but in the absence of any mention of the actual or potential threat to Europe posed by Russia, China, Iran, or of Hamas and assorted jihadis, this was hypocritical partisanship. For Ireland is utterly dependent on others for its defence.…

NO-ONE HAD A KEENER EYE FOR Émile Zola than Cézanne. And no wonder. They were boyhood friends. Having grown up together in Aix-en-Provence, they kept up a lively — at times, even faintly homoerotic — correspondence even long after they had both become famous. Over the years, Cézanne drew or painted the novelist several times; but perhaps his most revealing portrait is now in the São Paulo Museum of Art. Paintedin 1869/70—just as Zola was embarking on the vast Rougon-Macquart series of novels — it is really a double portrait. On the left sits Paul Alexis, a young journalist, who had recently arrived in Paris from Provence, and who would go on to become Zola’s first biographer. He is reading aloud from a manuscript, with his legs crossed nervously under his…

LEGEND REPORTS THAT THE GREAT ANDmagnificent Emperor Frederick I never died; rather he sleeps under the Kyffhäuser Mountains in Thuringia, waiting for the day when can awake and reignite the greatness of the German Empire. Or so the story goes … In fact, this legend first emerged in the late thirteenth century with the myth-weavers embroidering it around the later emperor Frederick II, not his grand-father Frederick I (1122-1190). This story is one of the many long-held convictions Graham Loud examines — and often explodes — in Frederick Barbarossa, a new and punchy history of this most famous of German emperors. Far from adding an extra layer of lustre to the emperor’s heroic credentials, Loud instead offers a rather more complex and nuanced portrait of an all-too-human ruler attempting to…

AS DISPUTES OVER FREE SPEECH IN the internet age rage, a pithy genealogy of the subject with a strong argument is both timely and welcome. Princeton historian Fara Dabhoiwala’s What is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea certainly fits the bill. His basic thesis, that there is a long tradition of free speech within well understood ethical and legal limits, and that free speech absolutism is a relatively recent norm born from American libertarianism, has much to recommend it, and is based on sound scholarship. Likewise, his warning that private power and money is as much a threat to free speech as government censorship is surely right, as is his argument that free speech is not an end in itself, but should serve the common good. So much…

ARE WE “REPAGANISING”? LOUISE PERry says yes. Tom Holland thinks we’re still a deeply Christian culture. If we are indeed shedding the last vestiges of Christian morality, is that something to celebrate or fear? Nadya Williams enters the debate with her new book, Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic, in which she draws convincing parallels between pre-Christian and contemporary morality. At the core of the work is her argument that “the default, history shows, has been and continues to be the embrace of death". This, for Williams, is most evident in the treatment of what she terms “the useless ones”: people who, being unprofitable for the economy, were often despised and neglected in pagan societies. For example, parents exposed their unwanted newborns — especially if visibly disabled — leaving them…

SAY WHAT YOU LIKE ABOUT THE place, Covent Garden takes seriously its mission to confront us with the worst thing in the world: wealthy, bourgeois, ageing white racist perverts. And now they’ve put them on stage, too! Those non-bourgeois lads Mark-Anthony Turnage (composer), Lee Hall (writer) and Richard Jones (director) teamed up to transfer the old Danish “My dad’s a child-rapist!” movie Festen (“Celebration”) to the stage — the most hotly anticipated new opera for a while — and how the lookalike audience roared. For the past 30 years, a favourite stage design has been a mirror-image of the auditorium, the audience confronted by their degenerate selves — notably in Germany, a milksop modern equivalent of Baader-Meinhoff’s pungently-expressed quibbles with the state’s habit of re-habilitating all those old Nazis. Citizens…

A LARGE DOLLOP OF IRONY COMES with the sky-high ticket price for Th e Seagull at the Barbican. Chekhov’s masterpiece tragicomedy is re-tooled here by a star left wing German director (Thomas Ostermeier), with a screen-and-stage doyenne, Cate Blanchett, and luminous supporting cast. Back in 1896 when it was first performed in St Petersburg, the clash of generations bound by duty and fate, while struggling to comprehend or even like each other, enthralled wealthy Russian theatregoers (eventually, after its disastrous opening night). Some things don’t change. Blanchett comes to London as part of a busy pipeline of cinema A-listers haunting the stage: in this modern dress production adapted by Ostermeier and Duncan Macmillan, she vamps it up with gusto as Irina Arkadina, the self-obsessed actress on an enforced summer holiday…

“SCHOOL,” PROCLAIMS IRWIN, THE contrarian teacher, at the start of Alan Bennett’s The History Boys. “That’s all it is. In my case anyway. Back to school.” Some old boys don’t have to go back, because they never left. Nicky Campbell, who attended Edinburgh Academy, bears the wounds four decades later, so his Radio 4 three-parter, How Boarding Schools Shaped Britain, was very personal. These programmes were deeply felt, and that depth diminished them slightly. Campbell is a confident, not to say assertive soul. Many moons ago, on Five Live, he introduced Jonathan Agnew, the BBC cricket correspondent, by associating “the sound of leather on willow” with “another English tradition, the sound of leather on something else”. The words jarred at the time, and two decades on they remain clumsy. Public…

ON 3 FEBRUARY I TELEPHONED Rabbit on the King’s Road in Chelsea to make a reservation. They said that the restaurant preferred customers to use their online booking system. Fair enough. The confirmation arrived, with the usual pass-ag Ts&Cs. The next day, a man named Jason emailed me asking me if I’d like to pre-book a “Mushroom Marmite Éclair with Egg Confit and Cornichon, at £3.50 (each)”. That felt a bit needy, but I let it pass. I had dinner on 6 February. At 01.26 am on 7 February, Jason emailed to ask how my experience had been. On 9 February, Jason emailed again, hoping that I had savoured every bite! Might I care to leave a little review? Or perhaps I’d like to contact another address with any “Local…

WHAT IS HAPPENING IN THE art world in the Arabian Gulf? The completion of museums on a spectacular scale with world-class collections is the clearest demonstration of the region’s cultural investment in recent years, while the sheikhs providing the funding are presumed, perhaps unjustly, to be focused on acquiring luxury goods. This unabashed materialism, dependent on iconology and branding, seems at odds with the idealism, pseudo-intellectualism and iconoclasm of much contemporary art. But how do the two combine within a country which is also the guardian of Islam’s holiest sites and not known for freedom of expression. Indeed, the large and very expensive museum projects in Qatar and Abu Dhabi may come to be dwarfed by Saudi Arabia’s plans. King Salman’s son, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) is the…

ONE OF THE BEST WINS I’VE HAD was a loser. In February 2004, Nicky Henderson told me that his novice hurdler, Fleet Street, was the best in Britain, and that he’d only get beaten in the Supreme Novices at Cheltenham if the Irish had a better one. He had very little public profile—his warm-up race was at unvaunted Taunton — and he was on offer at 40/1 for Cheltenham. Even better, he was 18/1 for a place on Betfair. I went mad and put all the money I could afford to lose on him for a place. And I kept piling in, right up to the evening before. Nicky was absolutely right. Fleet Street finished third, beaten by Brave Inca and War Of Attrition (who went on to win the…

Sometimes getting a scoop doesn’t take detective work. Sometimes it’s hidden in plain sight … The general editor looked. He saw ‘Russian plot… coup d’etat … overthrow constitutional government … red dictatorship … goat butts head of police … imprisoned blonde … vital British interest jeopardized,’ it was enough; it was news. ‘It’s news,’ he said, ‘Stop the machines at Manchester and Glasgow. Clear the line to Belfast and Paris. Scrap the whole front page. Kill the Ex-Beauty Queen’s pauper funeral. Get in a photograph of Boot.’ THIS IS THE MOMENT WHEN EVELYN WAUGH’S wittiest creation, the bumbling William Boot, “makes good”. Accidentally sent to cover a war in Africa, Boot gets the titular scoop — that a coup is being planned — because he is too green to realise he’s…

SARAH DITUM A last act of love THE ARRIVAL OF SPRING HAS FELT MORE THAN usually welcome, after a more than usually bleak winter. Last time I wrote this column, I mentioned that my dog — the fabulous Jessie — was displeased about our building work. Soon after, though, I realised that Jessie’s unhappiness was more than temporary. Fourteen is a grand age for a labrador, and in the last couple of years Jessie’s arthritis had become more severe. It’s a pitfall of her breed, although rigorous enforcement by the sausage police (me) meant that she avoided the other classic labrador problem of obesity, which in turn reduced the strain on her joints. She still liked gentle walks, and especially swimming. When that changed, I knew the end was close.…

I HAVE BEEN PLANNING MY PARENTS’ DEATH with them for some time. That is not to say we have bought tickets to Dignitas or are writing in support of the dreadfully drafted “Assisted Dying" Bill; rather, we are thinking about how to manage their assets. It is complex. There is not only the inheritance tax to think about, but that care home fees can wipe out your whole estate in just a few short years. Throughout, the constant refrain of my father has been “this isn’t right”. Despite having both paid into the system all their lives, they are having to contemplate the almost complete erosion of their life’s work at their greatest time of need — while those who have never contributed, as my father also regularly points out, have…

WHEN I’M FEELING mischievous, my answer to the question “Who is your Christian hero?” is Cardinal Richelieu. He is author of the line: “Man is immortal, his salvation is hereafter, the state has no immortality, its salvation is now or never.” That a state doesn’t have a soul is correct. The United Kingdom is not going to be greeted with a hearty handshake by St Peter at the Pearly Gates. And yet a state has the ethical authority to do things which individuals do not. The most obvious of these is to kill. Whether in war, before a child’s birth, at the end of a person’s life, or as a punishment for crime, the question of whether the state can authorise its agents to end a life is not a…

AROUND 1623, WHEN JAMES VI OFScots and I of England was old, drunk, tired, heartbroken, politically ineffectual and correspondingly unpopular, someone jeered that Elizabeth had been king of England, James, her successor, its queen. In Queen James Gareth Russell has set out to consider, in James’s own words, “the particular man” as opposed to the king — the private and the personal overriding the public and the political. But in the same breath Russell admits this is really an impossibility in the case of an “aspiring absolutist” such as James. So Russell arrives at a generous and pacey guide to both the life and reign, all but coterminous as they were, since James was crowned King of Scots at 13 months. Although James lost two regents of his blood to…

WINSTON CHURCHILL IS NEVER far from the thoughts of those who love liberty, but England has seldom had need of him more than now. Our great wartime ally is now seemingly spoiling for a fight, not with oriental despotisms, but with Europe and the English-speaking peoples. Churchill, proudly half-American, would have been mortified by the present administration’s dismemberment of the Atlantic alliance that he did more than anyone else to forge. On his first visit to the White House, the Prime Minister told the President that “it was so good to see the bust of Winston Churchill back in its rightful place”. (The White House sculpture (right) is by Jacob Epstein — not as good a likeness as that by Oscar Nemon in the Commons.) A pity that, of all…

QUID EST VERITAS? THAT CRUCIAL question of “what is truth?” underpins Matt Goodwin’s incisive diagnosis of just what is going wrong in universities as once-hallowed institutions stray farther from pursuing — let alone asking — this question. While some may dismiss Bad Education as a oneman polemic, this concise, public-facing work offers a pithy dissection of the political, social, and financial issues afflicting academia. This book is essential reading for those who think that freedom of speech and academic freedom are not currently under threat. Universities have long been notorious for leaning left, but the present imbalance would make John Henry Newman — author of The Idea of a University — shudder. Instead of being hubs of vigorous debate, universities are now colonised by an insidious ideology, driven by the…

IN OPEN SOCRATES, THE PHILOSOPHER AGnes Callard asks what it means to live an ethical, fullfilling life and decides, more or less, that it means being like the philosopher Agnes Callard. She is, it seems clear, relentlessly inquisitive, and thinks we would be better off being relentlessly inquisitive. This sounds more cruel than I intend to be. Open Socrates is about the value of philosophical dialogue, and I imagine that it would be a lot of fun to talk about philosophy with Agnes Callard. Her book is lively, good-natured and thought-provoking. Still, we can have warm acquaintances with a knack for winding us up. I agree with Callard that we are too resistant to asking deep questions of each other and ourselves. I feel like we should pursue “meaning” in…

ROY ORBISON HATED BLUE VELVET the first time he saw it. However much you like David Lynch’s 1986 movie (and having rewatched many of Lynch’s films since he died in January, I know that I like it a lot), you can understand why. Orbison’s song “In Dreams” appears twice in Blue Velvet, and both times the effect is sinister to the point of horrific. For Orbison, who did not approve the use, this was a kind of sacrilege. “In Dreams”, first released in 1963, was his: now Lynch had taken it. It isn’t only that Orbison wrote and performed “In Dreams”. It’s that no one else could have done so. Orbison was unique — in his image, in his vocal ability, in his artistry and in his emotional register. His peers…

THE FIRST TIME I SAW STARSHIP Troopers, I laughed like a drain. Paul Verhoeven’s satire of impossibly beautiful teenagers going to war against alien “bugs” opens with a propaganda spoof so gloriously over-the-top that I was sold from the first minute. This was not the universal response. Everyone else in the cinema with me, for instance, thought they were watching an indifferent action film, and a poorly acted one at that, and that Verhoeven had seemingly cast great-looking but wooden stars to give his tale of militarism the right neo-fascist look. The first hour of Mickey 17 promises a similar level of sci-fi satire. Robert Pattinson plays a likeable but dimwitted loser who, fleeing loan sharks on Earth, joins a colonising spaceship as its “Expendable”, someone who does mortally dangerous jobs.…

THE SAMPLE IS TOO SMALL TO MAKE it anything other than a curious fact that many painters who were also poets have often been marked by a non-standard psychology. Under today’s clinical terms, Michelangelo probably suffered from depression and anxiety; William Blake was prone to melancholy, the “shakes” and hallucinations; Edvard Munch’s fragile mental health was exacerbated by alcohol and veered close at times to schizophrenia; while David Jones most likely suffered from PTSD after his experiences in the First World War. There is no hard and fast link; other painter-poets such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Paul Klee and Picasso, for example, all had their quirks but nevertheless passed as fully functioning personalities. An intriguing painter-poet who falls into the first category is Zhu Da (1626–1705), also known as Bada…

WHEN I WAS VERY YOUNG, I SPENT A GREAT DEAL of time with my Great Uncle, Joseph Phipps. Uncle Joe was the archetypal uncle: short, round, bald with twinkling blue eyes and an infinite fund of funny stories. He and my aunt had no children of their own, so I filled the role of a sort of locum grandson. It was Uncle Joe who introduced me to cufflinks. He owned a pair of beautiful “ball and chain” gold links inherited from his own father that I now own. He showed me how to attach them, which is a much fiddlier operation than affixing the modern rotating bar type. He also warned me against ever bending down to pick up a fallen link. He had dropped his own cufflink, and I…

I CAUGHT TWIGGY, SADIE FROST’S new documentary, the other day. Afterwards, I asked Twigs how much of her much-vaunted “iconic style” had been her own, given that her haircut was the decision of Leonard of Mayfair, who imposed a seven-hour crop and colour, whether she liked it or not (she dug it). Everything else was her, she explained: her make-up inspired by her rag doll — ninety minutes to apply three pairs of false eyelashes, then paintbrush on “Twiggy lines” below the eye; her clothes from Barbara Hulanicki’s Biba. I asked because the internet’s been going on about the impossibility of personal style in the age of The Algorithm again. Translation: we’re all fed the same stuff, then replicate it, becoming clones, while imagining we are dazzling originals. Now, we…