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Arts

A Woman Bathing In A Stream/Rembrandt 1654

You might have thought radio is not the best medium to present an art programme but I always enjoy Moving Pictures on Radio 4 presented by Cathy Fitzgerald. The picture  subject matter is on the programme website but I prefer to consult my Works of Rembrandt by the publisher Taschen which had a [...]

February 6, 2025 // 0 Comments

Reflections upon Ireland 27 England 22 (Six Nations)

Yesterday I tuned into ITV’s coverage of the Six Nations clash at Croke Park between last year’s champions Ireland and England – under the captaincy of decade-long “FEC” (future England captain) Maro Itoje (now 30) for the first time – which resulted in a 27-22 victory for the [...]

February 2, 2025 // 0 Comments

France 44 Wales 0 (Six Nations)

France opened the Six Nations with a resounding victory over Wales. The only negative in an impressive performance was the upgraded red card given to Romain Ntamack which might put the fly half – only recently returned from a long injury lay-off – out for a sizeable part of the rest of [...]

February 1, 2025 // 0 Comments

The Tanner Report: Fulham 0 Manchester Utd 1

The less said about this dreadful match the better. Fulham’s performance was dire: once again they sat back in the second half and, the longer it stayed 0-0, the more I thought the away team would score. Tactics tend to be impressionable and many sides – Fulham included – adopt [...]

January 27, 2025 // 0 Comments

Nazi war crimes: fact or fiction?

In the week I had two interesting conversations regarding the Nazis. The first was with an old cultivated friend and brother of a distinguished historian, who said that non-fiction was more reliable than any fiction in understanding history. The second was with a highly knowledgeable, well informed [...]

January 23, 2025 // 0 Comments

Match of the Day new presenters

Alex Jay-Kerski’s (BBC Director of Sport) garlanding of the three new Match Of The Day presenters (Kelly Cates, Gabby Logan and Mark Chapman) reminded me of the line in the John Betjeman poem The Village Inn. Here the virtues of the modernisation of the local pub are extolled by the Brewer’s [...]

January 18, 2025 // 0 Comments

El Cid/The book and the film

I was recently given a new biography of El Cid, the Spanish 11th Century knight, by Nora Berend, a Cambridge University historian. Her thesis is that Rodrigo de Viva – far rom being a patriot – was a mercenary. She concedes that many of the primary sources are unreliable. However this [...]

January 12, 2025 // 0 Comments

Foreign detective writing

We tend to assume that only English-speaking writers can write detective novels. In Britain the genre is dominated by women – Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Marjoriec Allingham and recently Val McDiamid. In fact some interesting detective novels have been written by French writers and [...]

January 9, 2025 // 0 Comments

Surprising actors in a 1980 TV series

On Monday I watched Bergerac, now shown at 3.00pm on the UK Drama channel. It featured – as Belle Young, an eccentric boatowner and smuggler – the 1970s actress Judy Cornwall. Yesterday’s episode about a computer convention in Jersey also featured a computer nerd and mogul Jordan [...]

January 8, 2025 // 0 Comments

My Sporting Weekend

The Border-Gavaskar trophy between Australia and India has done much to enhance and elevate the status of Test cricket. India won the First Test in Perth – Australia levelled the series in Adelaide – and the Third Test in Brisbane was a washout draw. Australia won the Fourth Test in [...]

January 5, 2025 // 0 Comments

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