Just in

Articles by Alice Mansfield

Avatar photo
About Alice Mansfield

A graduate of the Slade, Alice has painted and written about art all her life. With her children now having now grown up and departed the nest, she recently took up sculpture. More Posts

Fake or Fortune

Fake or Fortune is back for a series on a peak time of 8pm on a Sunday. For an arts programme this is unusual programming and speaks volumes for its popularity and quality. A viewer is requested to submit a painting whose provenance and genuineness are in question and the presenters Fiona Bruce, [...]

July 19, 2016 // 0 Comments

Freya/Anthony Quinn

I  discovered Anthony Quinn a few years ago when he wrote a first rate novel Half the Human Race about a depressed Edwardian cricketer. I very much enjoyed too Curtain Call a novel set between the wars in bohemian and theatrical London. At the heart of the novel is a relationship between society [...]

April 8, 2016 // 0 Comments

The Honoured Society/Norman Lewis

There is a certain and deliberate irony in the title of this Norman Lewis work on the Sicilan Mafia as the distinguished travel writer clearly regards the Sicilan mafia as dishonourable. His observation of them runs from 1943 to 1962. In 1943 the Allies invaded Sicily. The Canadian and British [...]

March 26, 2016 // 0 Comments

The Noise of Time/ Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes does not so much wear his scholarship lightly as hit you over the head with it. I only recently finished his essays on art.  Here he writes in the same didactic tone on the life of Dmitri Shostakovich.  This is not to condemn the book. It is especially good on the fate of the [...]

March 10, 2016 // 0 Comments

The Modern Garden exhibition/Royal Academy

Whatever the subject matter or the content there is something unsatisfactory about a blockbuster exhibition. Firstly the crowds inhibit any true appreciation of a picture when as many as ten gather around it. Secondly there is the blatant commercialism that ensures you finish up in the museum shop. [...]

February 9, 2016 // 0 Comments

Ken Howard exhibition

Last Tuesday  I attended Ken Howard ‘s annual show at the Richard Green Gallery. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Ken Howard and Richard  Green is thst they are in their eighties and still going strong. Arriving early I was able to speak to Ken and see his paintings without the [...]

January 15, 2016 // 0 Comments

Keeping an eye open/ Essays on Art Julian Barnes

As Julian Barnes himself admits, writing about something visual in art is not just difficult but, in some people eyes notably Degas , worthless. His essays have however been critically acclaimed and I was curious to read them.  Where would they be pitched: at the cognoscenti, the literati, or the [...]

December 30, 2015 // 0 Comments

The Rules of the Game

One of the aspects of my work which I most enjoy and as Arthur Daley might say a”nice little earner” is advising on art acquisition. I am sufficiently critical of myself, my clientele and the art world to say there is an element of hypocrisy here. The client may say and will be advised [...]

October 30, 2015 // 0 Comments

Up Against the Night/ Justin Cartwright

I begin this review with an admission: I know Justin Cartwright and like him immensely. Thus the reader might charge me with being unobjective and also I can see biographical elements to his novel that the more detached reader does not. It’s the story written in the “I” form of [...]

October 7, 2015 // 0 Comments

The Meursault Investigation / Kamel Daoud

Though largely ignored in British literary circles this first novel by Algerian  journalist Kamel  Daoud has created a sensation in France, won prizes, is a best seller, been translated into 17 languages and the film of it is to be released in 2017. The conceit is the brother of the Arab killed [...]

September 3, 2015 // 0 Comments

1 … 17 18 19 20 21

Copyright © 2026 The National Rust | Design by Premonition