More from Arts

Quite the most important programme on TV last week — possibly all year — was Bjorn Lomborg on Environmentalism, part of Channel 5’s excellent Big Ideas series. It was well-argued, punchy, intelligent and persuasive, and it ought to become compulsory viewing in every school in Britain. But, of course, it won’t be for reasons that Lomborg outlined in his programme: the environmental movement has transformed itself into an all-powerful religion which sees any criticism, however well-justified, as heresy punishable by ostracism, calumny and vicious assault by custard pie. Lomborg is the Danish professor of statistics who is reviled by eco fascists everywhere because of his landmark 2001 book, The Skeptical Environmentalist.

When I heard of the London explosions last Thursday — I was rung shortly before leaving to catch a train to London, which I had to abandon — my first thought was, why did it take them so long? We knew the manpower was here, either coming in as bogus asylum-seekers or by using false passports, easily accomplished since the government gave up preventing entry. Whether the bombers came from their ranks or are brainwashed, resentful Muslim youths born here — and at the time of writing it appears they were born here — only the investigation will reveal. I assumed the reason bombs hadn’t been used before was not the lack of people who were willing to do it but the difficulty of finding or bringing in explosives, a problem they’ve now clearly solved.

Sir Edwin Lutyens reckoned that there will never be great architects or architecture without great patrons, and I rather think the same is true of botanical art. The exhibition presently on show at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, entitled A New Flowering: 1,000 Years of Botanical Art, seems to reinforce the point. Displayed are works by the greats of the past — Besler, Ehret, Redouté, Jacquin and the Bauer brothers — all of whom were dependent on imaginative private patronage, and these hang alongside paintings by more than a score of contemporary artists from the collection of one patron, Dr Shirley Sherwood. She is the guest curator of the exhibition and, incidentally, wife of James Sherwood, chairman of Orient-Express Hotels.

It’s a good thing that the Royal Opera keeps its revivals of standard Italian repertoire in good shape, considering the many acute disappointments we have had this season from new productions, Italian, German, French. John Copley’s La Bohème was first staged in 1974, but the latest revival, with a fair number of fresh touches added by the associate director Richard Gregson, and with Mark Elder conducting, is welcome, even if not quite ranking with the finest of its previous runs. It has an almost uniformly excellent cast, but some of these performers are mildly miscast; and for all the lucidity and careful climax-building of the conducting, it may suffer from being slightly too refined.

For the first time since 1990 I decided not to go to Glastonbury this year. It was a purely practical decision: the drug intake needed to get you through those three days is so vast that it wipes you out for the rest of summer and, for a change, I thought it would be interesting to see what July, August and September are like unmediated by insomnia, lethargy, paranoia, depression and the continual urge to dance to anything with a repetitive beat. Watching it all on TV instead, it struck me that the BBC’s fantastically thorough coverage of Glastonbury is one of the wonders of the modern world. I won’t say it’s almost better than being there — that would be silly.

As a landscape painter, Graham Sutherland (1903–80) enjoyed a meteoric rise to fame through the 1930s and 40s, culminating in the Venice Biennale in 1952, a prestigious Tate retrospective in 1953 and the Order of Merit, Britain’s highest award, in 1960. His later years saw success as a portrait-painter to the rich and famous, and the scandalously destroyed portrait of Sir Winston Churchill. Yet there hasn’t been a decent Sutherland exhibition in Britain for more than 20 years, since, in fact, the rather-too-inclusive Tate retrospective of 1982. In the meantime his stock, once dangerously inflated by certain over-eager supporters, has sunk dramatically.