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Picasso and Paper

This is a monumental exhibtion and expostion of Picasso’s works from his  early years as precocious draughtsman in his birthplace Malaga when he was compared to Raphael, through the blue and rose periods, to Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, to cubism, his obsessiveness with Delacroix and Manet, his [...]

January 28, 2020 // 0 Comments

“Fake News” musings

One of the joys of being ‘being a certain age’ is the sense you has seen it all before even if, on a personal level, that isn’t quite necessarily true. The art of staying personally relevant in the 21st Century is tied to the notion that, whatever is going on, the essential nature of the [...]

January 27, 2020 // 0 Comments

The BBC – it was not ever thus

I am reading an excellent book – Last Hope Island by Lynne Olson. It is an account of how many Europeans notably heads of government, or self-styled ones like Charles de Gaulle, came to the UK in 1940 as it was the only substantial western European democracy not under the Nazi jack boot. The [...]

January 24, 2020 // 0 Comments

Back to the future, maybe

This organ used to pride itself on its unique and contrary, slightly left-field ‘oldie’ takes on aspects of modern living. Indeed this was the central theme our board’s USP when pitching for the US$1.6 billion funding injection in the fall of 2016 that took us into exclusive league of [...]

January 22, 2020 // 0 Comments

You pays your money …

The name Picasso is so engrained in the world’s psyche that several times during his lifetime, and indeed regularly after it, his reputation has become subject to relentless attack by the forces of reappraisal, revisionism, post-modernism and even those who aspire to the famous ‘with [...]

January 21, 2020 // 0 Comments

Test coverage

Once upon a time in the good old days of TMS, lengthy breaks in play were greeted with pleasure as the team could sustain a discussion on all matters cricket for hours on end. The modern broadcaster cannot so they have to pad out with replays of interviews, of the match and/or any other match. [...]

January 20, 2020 // 0 Comments

Allen and Beryl Freer: a salutary lesson

Its often and incorrectly assumed that to build a collection you have to be one of the super-rich. It is true that fine art and high finance have merged and collecting an old Master – or a modern one – is a badge of wealth. However the collection built up by Allen and Beryl Freer, to be [...]

January 15, 2020 // 0 Comments

The Trial of Christine Keeler

I’m 3 episodes into the The Trial of Christine Keeler and am underwhelmed. Superficially it has all the elements of a powerful drama: sex, power, scandal , interesting personalities and no need to create any characters. The problem is that the story line is actually quite complex. The shooting [...]

January 8, 2020 // 0 Comments

University Challenge

We Rusters seem to have our own way of getting through the festive period and mine was University Challenge whose celebrity version of alumni appeared as contestants around 8.30 pm every evening. Following the excellent article on sit-coms I recollect and review that other staple of telly – [...]

January 7, 2020 // 0 Comments

On the way out, but laughing

Being a Ruster, my relationship with large swathes of the modern world – including technology, a bug-bear mentioned recently by my colleague William Byford – is generally tentative or somewhat hit-and-miss and so I set out to compose my post today with positive intent but also with [...]

January 4, 2020 // 0 Comments

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