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Auction houses v Art dealers

Yesterday I spent the whole of my afternoon following the Christie’s auction of Modern British and Irish Art. The famous auction house has adapted to the digital age by holding auctions online. It attracts a more global audience but I felt some of the bidding tension one experiences in the room [...]

October 18, 2024 // 0 Comments

Taste/Stanley Tucci: My Life Through Food (2021)

Stanley Tucci is a successful film actor who has made a second career of out his great interest in – and love of – food. I first became aware of this through his TV programmes travelling to different cities and reporting on their cuisine. He develops this in his book starting with [...]

October 17, 2024 // 0 Comments

3 art views

I’m sometimes asked whether I have visited any of the big art exhibitions in London right now – the Van Gogh at the National Gallery, the Francis Bacon at the National Portrait Gallery and the Claude Monet at the Courtauld. The answer is an emphatic “No” as these block buster [...]

October 16, 2024 // 0 Comments

Confronting & complying with the digital age.

A common beef amongst us elder Rusters is the constant reference and delegation by service  providers to mobiles and websites. How many times – when you are hanging on the phone trying to reach a human – do you have to hear the words: “You might find it easier to use our website [...]

October 11, 2024 // 0 Comments

Redlands/Chichester Festival Theatre (review)

With almost six decades of connection with the area behind us – and our status as “friends” of Chichester Festival Theatre – when this season’s announcement of future productions arrived about six months ago my wife and I had immediately identified this production as one we wished [...]

October 9, 2024 // 0 Comments

Gabriel’s Moon/William Boyd

A newly published William Boyd novel is a big literary event especially for his legion of followers. The general critical view is his recent novels fall short of his earliest West African  ones and Any Human Heart. He is a master story teller and Gabriel’s Moon conforms to that. There are [...]

October 9, 2024 // 0 Comments

A visit to Hever Castle

Yesterday my wife and I happened to be in the area of Edenbridge in Kent with a couple of hours to spare and decided to indulge ourselves with a “brush with history” by visiting Hever Castle, the ancestral home of the Boleyn family and, of course, famously Anne Boleyn, King Henry [...]

September 29, 2024 // 0 Comments

Fake or Fortune (new series BBC 1)

Fake or Fortune is back on our screens and last night I watched a rather disappointing episode in a series I both enjoy and admire. The subject painting was a depiction of a white chrysanthemum by the celebrated Dutch abstractionist Piet Mondrian. Most artists have painted flowers and – [...]

September 29, 2024 // 0 Comments

A la Colthard/The Pig on South Downs

I have visited this restaurant several times and yesterday went there with an old friend in the advertising industry who knows his food and wine. From the moment we arrived at the attractive hotel in Madehurst near Chichester he was impressed. There was a mix up with the booking dates (my fault!!!) [...]

September 26, 2024 // 0 Comments

Cricketing national identities

Reading articulate and well-informed books on post-War Caribbean cricket led me to the scarcely original theory that cricket is not played in that many countries but each has an identity  and style of its own. The West Indies dominated cricket for 20 years under Clive Lloyd and Viv Richards but no [...]

September 25, 2024 // 0 Comments

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