I visited a friend who lives in Sherborne, Gloucestershire, last week and came across this fine sculpture in the parish church, The Guardian Angel Tramples Death Underfoot, a monument to the local squire and his wife. It's carved with a beautiful lightness of touch from a marble with a remarkably pure ... Read More...
Month: August 2010
It is fortunate for us mere mortals that the sexual escapades that consume and torment the greatest artistic geniuses often produce such an enjoyable legacy of great works, and so it is the case with Richard Wagner; a lusty chap whose angst-furrowed brow concealed a pair of eyes constantly on ... Read More...
Waking to a sunny morning - at last! - and conscious as ever of my duties as The Dabbler's Jack Hargreaves, I was up betimes with a song in my heart and the Surrey Hills in my mind. Pausing only to don the metaphorical Norfolk jacket, set the metaphorical trilby ... Read More...
The above picture shows a solitary peregrine falcon sending a flock of starlings into turmoil. It won the 2005 Wildlife Photographer of the Year award for Manual Presti. When I first saw it I was oddly reminded of my favourite sports picture - this one below of Maradona playing against Holland ... Read More...
A guest post by Elberry, an English teacher based in Germany, and the first of an occasional series of Close Readings. Patrick Kurp quotes from Henry James´ great The Beast in the Jungle: Marcher knew him at once for one of the deeply stricken--a perception so sharp that nothing else in the ... Read More...
Back to classical this week, with four great cellists. Pablo Casals (1876-1973) was such an ardent supporter of the Spanish Republican government that after its defeat in 1939 he vowed not to return to Spain until democracy had been restored, but despite managing an impressive innings of 96 years he ... Read More...
Around this time last year, I read an article about a ‘wine bible’ costing a whopping £640,000. The sixty four million dollar question is how the publishers, Kraken Opus, arrived at such a price? Okay, this is an 850 page limited edition book weighing more than 30 kg, so I ... Read More...
Today is the 95th anniversary of the birth of Ingrid Bergman. This year also happens to see the 65th anniversary of the release of Hitchcock's Spellbound, in which she starred with Gregory Peck.Those two are surely the most perfectly-formed and clean-cut leading actors cinema has ever seen. Strange that they ... Read More...
People who love both cats and poetry are almost certainly familiar with Christopher Smart's lines beginning "For I will consider my cat Jeoffry", much favoured by anthologists. How many, though, have gone on to read the (much, much longer) work from which they are excerpted, Jubilate Agno, one of the ... Read More...
I used to regularly travel on business with a friend who would always take the opportunity to watch a shopping channel when we stayed in a hotel with cable or satellite TV (this was in the days when most British TVs only received the five channels). He was in awe of ... Read More...
