Antiques

Wednesday

Jonathan Meades

The man who – inadvertently – invented the 1970s

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.

Tuesday

Clemmie Read

Tuscan escapades: Villa Coco, by Andrew Sean Greer, reviewed

From our UK edition

The comic novelist Andrew Sean Greer won the Pulitzer Prize for Less, a chronicle of the longings and humiliations of modern life. But now, he suspects, we’d all like an escape. ‘Whatever happened to the charm novel?’ he asks in his new outing, thinking of the lighter works of Nancy Mitford and Graham Greene. Since they are apparently out of fashion, he has decided to write his own. Villa Coco follows a young American archivist, hired to catalogue the antiques in Tuscany of an aged baronessa, known to her friends as ‘Coco’, only to find himself drawn into increasingly absurd adventures instead. He arrives in late summer, with all the American fantasies of Italy in tow: ‘A confection of movies and food... pasta and accordions and Leonardo and cheese.

Sunday

Ruari Clark

The delightful melancholy of an antiques shop

From our UK edition

Antique shops are melancholy places. The deep leather armchairs, Anglepoise lamps and bamboo bookshelves. They ask questions: who sat, worked or read using these? Banal questions, possibly, but life is generally banal, and no less poignant for that. It’s not an unpleasant sort of melancholia. Quite the opposite. If I had to create a word to describe the feeling, I’d say it was melanphoria: ‘a state of intense excitement arising from a feeling of deep sadness’. One feels both a nostalgia for the lives of strangers and a sense of life’s possibilities. If this is abnormal, I would ask any amateur psychiatrists to write to The Spectator offices. I am physically unable to go into any antique shop without buying something. It is rarely a grand purchase.