Arts feature

‘I have seldom had such a delicious hour,’ Isaiah Berlin wrote to me in January 1993. ‘I realise that Avedon and I are now friends for life, even if I never see him again.’ Berlin wasn’t alone in being bewitched. A few months earlier, Tina Brown had taken over as editor of the New Yorker and hired Avedon as staff photographer to open up its pages of solid, sacrosanct text. It was a blasphemous but brilliant move. With him came an incredible archive of images: Picasso, Stravinsky, Beckett, Hitchcock, Bogard, Garland, Auden, Chaplin, Streisand, Bacon, Capote, the Beatles… I could go on. As the TNY’s photographer – its only photographer – Avedon was under commission to produce new work, and as London editor, my role was to suggest new subjects to interest him.

André Previn began his career at MGM. And after he’d quit the studio to become conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, he liked to share an anecdote. His old Hollywood pal Norman Jewison, the director of Rollerball, brought a film composer friend to hear Previn conduct the LSO. ‘It’s nice, isn’t it, to see André here at the Festival Hall, with his own orchestra, getting cheered because of his performance of Beethoven’s Ninth?’ ventured Jewison. His colleague nodded: ‘Sure, but you have to admit – it’s a shame how completely he screwed up his career.

Regard the protestors. See how happy they are. Can you hear them whoop and whistle? The burning clock tower of the town hall has fallen inside the old building. Houp-là. How they whistle and whoop! The baying of such mobs in public places is as old as the history of towns and cities, the burning of buildings equally antique. Order and chaos, civilisation and barbarity, the call of the primeval. Limoges has long been famed for its ‘arts of fire’, of the elements and crafts involved in the making of enamelware that reached its artistic zenith between the 12th and 14th centuries with a host of exquisite crucifixes, crosiers and tomb effigies, a hosanna of book covers and reliquary caskets.

Returning to Britain this year, I have been struck by the re-emergence of some of the 1970s’ smoothest sounds. This summer it seemed that every pub in London was filled with mulleted twenty-somethings foot-tapping along to a yacht-rock classic. Steely Dan have gone from 2.5 million monthly listeners in 2022 to more than 8 million today Yacht rock developed on the west coast of the United States and combined complex, jazz-inspired composition with catchy hooks and a soft tone. Think Steely Dan or Rupert Holmes. But before this year I had assumed it was doomed to uncoolness. Then I came across Toast Club, who were selling tickets to their debut album release party at the Windmill in Brixton.

It’s hard to know where to start – or finish – when explaining the formidable Lilian Hochhauser, due her centenary birthday card from the King next month. Over more than 75 years, she and her husband Victor, who died in 2019, were Britain’s most respected musical impresarios. Their net ranged wide – from Gracie Fields and Mario Lanza in the 1950s to Chinese acrobats in the Noughties – but they will undoubtedly be best remembered for a unique ability to negotiate with stonewalling Russian bureaucracy and winkle out some of the Soviet Union’s greatest talents. ‘I worked hard, I loved music and I loved what I was doing.

Aphrodite – talk about a difficult birth. Her father the Sky (Ouranos) had come to resent the fertility of his wife/mother the Earth (Gaia). They’d had 18 children already – a gamesome brood that included Titans, Cyclopes, and the 100-handed Hecatoncheires. The last of these were so hateful that Ouranos convinced himself that he would be murdered by one of them and usurped as ruler on high. Ouranos’s way of coping with his complex was to keep on having sex with his wife so as to hole up his offspring in the birth canal. Gaia urged her sons to save her, but only Kronos, the youngest of the Titans, was brave enough. While his father was still at it, Kronos went in and lopped off his genitals with a sickle.

‘I probably got a one or two seconds look at him before he delivered the first blow,’ recalls Sir Salman Rushdie. For the next 27 seconds, on 12 August 2022, the man whom Rushdie will refer to only as A. (‘for asinine’, he explains) tried to kill the writer on the stage of the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York. A. slashed through the tendons of Rushdie’s right hand, cut his thigh, stomach and chest, incised a gaping wound in his neck and finally stabbed him in the right eye.

In the heart of Bloomsbury, deep in the bowels of the UCL geography department, down corridors floored in institutional linoleum, sticky and scuffed by generations of students, is a room full of maps. Hundreds of thousands stacked on top of each other, tidied away in sliding wooden drawers that march to the ceiling. But not only maps: there are shelves groaning with atlases, guidebooks and Baedeckers; an entire annexe given over to hundreds of wall charts. In fact, almost every conceivable way you might orient yourself on the globe, or make legible any geographical phenomenon on paper, is represented here. It’s a cartophile’s delight; an obsessive compulsive’s nightmare.

How the Froggies must be laughing. Such a gracious loan. So kind. Like England lending Henry V’s longbows to the Louvre – or sailing HMS Victory up the Seine. Well, let them titter. The Tapestry is home. Nothing else matters. Likely sewed in Canterbury in the 1070s, before being sent across the Channel, it has only ever left Bayeux twice before. In 1803, when Boney was contemplating a pop at the White Cliffs, he displayed it in Paris. (After Trafalgar, it was quietly returned to Normandy.) Then, as the Nazis were retreating from Operation Overlord, it was taken for safe keeping to the cellars of the Louvre and, in late 1944, only weeks after Paris’s liberation, placed on public view. Today’s minibreak from Bayeux comes in rather happier times.

Artists’ models seldom get a chance to tell their side of the story. Yet one model, Anthony Rudolf, believes they deserve to be ‘remembered for their work and their devotion’. His dazzling new book, Office Hours in the Studio of Paula Rego, celebrates one of the most remarkable artists of our time from this unique perspective. Rudolf is a poet, literary translator and the founder of the Menard Press. He and Rego were partners for the last 26 years of her life (though she preferred the less business-like French terms compagnon and compagne). About three months in, he ‘realised you could never get near Paula during office hours, which she worked strictly. I tentatively asked if I could become a model and she flung her arms around me, saying “I never dared ask you!

It was summer 1874 at Claude Monet’s house in Argenteuil on the Seine just outside Paris. Édouard Manet arrived from his house at Gennevilliers, on the opposite bank, and began painting Monet’s wife and infant son in the garden. Auguste Renoir turned up and started to paint the same scene alongside Manet. The little masterpiece he created is in the forthcoming exhibition Renoir and Love at the National Gallery. In 1924, Monet recalled that day half a century earlier: Manet, seduced by the colour and the light, decided to paint a picture en plein air of people under the trees… Renoir arrived… He asked me for my palette, a brush and a canvas, and there he was, painting away beside Manet.

Style, self-evidently among those who pursue an interest in such affairs, is, according to the Comte de Buffon, the man himself – the essence, the heart, the bowel, the bovril. While, among the much greater majority who pursue an ignorance in such affairs, it is an assumed gamut of off-the-peg tics, props, accent – style is something bolted on to a being’s chassis and core in the hope that it will hold. We can be certain which of these two nugatory classifications better suits the late Christopher Gibbs who in the course of his long, more or less antiquarian life encountered Everyone, absolutely Everyone. ‘Everyone’ in this instance unhelpfully signifies little beside the people, per se, whom Gibbs met, smiled at, sold to, bought from, bought for, advised and charmed.

Wasn’t it Philomena Cunk who first observed that Shakespeare’s greatest work is Game of Thrones? She had a point. When I told friends that the Royal Shakespeare Company was adapting George R.R. Martin’s saga for the stage, the GoT fans lit up. The non-fans were incredulous, and not in a good way. Now Game of Thrones: The Mad King has landed, nearly four hours of it, and it represents a gamble for the RSC. Nearly a decade after peak Thrones, a vast inbuilt audience can no longer be assumed. This new stage version needs to please both camps if it’s to become the money-spinner that the company clearly (and justifiably) intends it to be. I’d like to imagine that I’m the target audience.

In its campaign to preserve traditional British screen-free pleasures, English Heritage is promoting a variety of wholesome pastimes this summer, such as puppet shows and fairground and circus skills. Children will lap those up; but will they respond equally enthusiastically to English Heritage’s new initiative for 2026: to revive the habit of holiday-postcard writing?  This is the vision: that their young visitors, inspired to verbal exuberance by the castle, stately home or ancient ruin they’re enjoying, will snap up a couple of the new limited-edition postcards specially commissioned by English Heritage from the artists Nick Sharratt and Quentin Blake, and (ideally in the café) will write to their grandparents, aunts, uncles and godparents.

The FIM-92 Stinger missile is not a subtle weapon. An anti-aircraft rocket, capable of launching a high-explosive ‘fire and forget’ laser-guided warhead at targets up to 5km away, it can be carried and operated by only one man. During the 1980s Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the CIA provided hundreds of Stingers to the Mujahideen, where they proved terrifyingly lethal, downing scores of helicopter gunships and killing thousands of Soviet troops. But, at times, they’ve been as effective against other, more unusual targets. In 2001, during the first Taliban administration of Afghanistan, the group’s leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, ordered the destruction of the monumental Buddha statues in the Bamiyan valley, a historic Silk Road site deep within the Hindu Kush.

No one paints fairyland like Richard Dadd (1817-86). In ‘The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke’, 1855-64, he reveals a teeming congregation of tiny folk, summoned by a dragonfly trumpeter, marshalled by a pompous chamberlain no bigger than a daisy, all gathered in the presence of Merlin (dead centre) to witness a macho fairy break a hazelnut with an axe. The shell will serve, of course, as Queen Mab’s chariot. And yet the scene isn’t cute. By placing the shiny bald pate of a frightened gnome a jot too close to the swing of the axe, the artist suggests the fairy feller might break that nut instead. Dadd is like a Victorian Hieronymus Bosch.

As we ponder the ups and downs of our sporting record this summer, it might be worth noting our unquestioned prowess when it comes to the demands of classically based dancing. The Royal Ballet is consistently more than a match for any comparable company in the world, and its chief feeder, the Royal Ballet School, currently celebrating its centenary, is similarly and solidly rated as one of the two or three best of its kind anywhere. Both these institutions are deeply beholden to tradition, and the RBS might well be the most unabashedly elitist educational establishment in the country. It receives globally more than 2,500 applications a year. All these will lead to an audition, the number finally whittled down to 30-odd offers of a full-time place.

It’s a noble story of one man struggling against monstrous odds, valiantly captaining his crew while trying to avoid being skewered and striving to reclaim his crown. Welcome to the chronicles of Christopher Nolan and his hubristic film adaptation of the Odyssey. Will Nolan’s Odyssey make us feel – as Keats did when reading George Chapman’s translation of Homer – like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into our ken? Or will it be a thundering, 172-minute disappointment? Being a cinematic endeavour, the film should be judged more on its visuals than its script. And on that front, Nolan is pitting himself against a 2,700-year history of artworks depicting Homer’s epic.