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Assessing The British Lions Tour …

After rain of biblical proportions and lightning had so marred the game on Saturday, causing a lengthy suspension, the Lions lost 12-22 to Australia and the series ended 2-1 in the Lions’ favour. The British Lions are something of an anachronism – one of those quirky British [...]

August 3, 2025 // 0 Comments

Dora Carrington/Pallant Gallery

Was Dora Carrington an entitled, hedonistic member of the Bloomsbury set or a talented artist not properly recognised as she was a woman? I went along to see her exhibition at the Pallant Chichester yesterday and came away with the latter view. She was admitted to the Slade – where under [...]

April 26, 2025 // 0 Comments

Inventing Post Impressionism/Charleston

Yesterday I went to Charleston near Lewes for the exhibition Inventing Post Impressionism. The connection between Charleston and Post Impressionism is the art critic Roger Fry who invented the term. Charleston was the home of Vanessa and Clive Bell and the Sussex outpost of the Bloomsbury Group. [...]

March 27, 2025 // 0 Comments

Recent TV dramas

I was delighted that Ten Pound Poms – about the British emigration to Australia in the 1950s – is now in its second series. I can claim a connection as my parents knew an eccentric travel agent (S.G.) whose main business was the repatriation of such emigrants. Well do I remember visits [...]

March 26, 2025 // 0 Comments

Towards Zero and White Lotus

These TV dramatisations on BBC and Sky Atlantic reflect the great divide between the two broadcasters. Time was when the BBC drama department produced such cutting edge plays as Cathy Come Home and TV playwrights like Dennis Potter, but Towards Zero was sterile. Having read every Agatha Christie [...]

March 12, 2025 // 0 Comments

Eubank v McKenna

Last night was something of a rarity: live boxing on free-to -air television. The Noble Art has suffered from satellite coverage and pay-to-view and I cannot be the only disillusioned fan. There was not much sport to watch so I switched on at 9.00pm for the undercard of Belfast Boy Michael Conlon v [...]

March 8, 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

Man Utd: can they come back?

Students of history will know that the surprising factor is not that empires decline but that they last for so long. It’s not different in sport. Manchester Utd took a long time – and tried numerous managers – before achieving success after Matt Busby. Liverpool dominated the [...]

November 29, 2024 // 0 Comments

One Hell of a Life/biography of Brian Close by Stephen Chalke

Personally, whilst I respected Brian Close, not least for his often reckless courage, he was never a favourite of mine – there was too much of the curmudgeonly Yorkshireman for me. Stephen Chalke is more sympathetic of “Closey”. Close had the longest first class career of any [...]

October 19, 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

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