John betjeman

A Rogues’ Gallery, by Peter Lewis – review

From our UK edition

Like Mel Brooks’s character the Two Thousand-Year-Old Man, Peter Lewis has met everyone of consequence. Though he doesn’t mention being an eyewitness at the Crucifixion, he was told by T.S. Eliot that working in a bank was quite nice (‘I never thought about poetry in the day’). Frankie Howerd wanted Lewis to give him a massage (‘I have this trouble, a hernia, you see. Gives me a lot of discomfort’); Diana Dors confessed to him that she’d rather watch television than go to orgies (‘but I had to become a sex symbol on tiger rugs and in mink bikinis’); and Samuel Beckett made his excuses and fled (‘Sorry, I just have to go to the lav’).

A secret gallery at Hyde Park Corner

From our UK edition

A rare jewel sits in the middle of the Hyde Park Corner roundabout. The Quadrant Gallery, run by English Heritage, occupies the Wellington Arch. The gallery is showing a series of exhibitions to mark the centenary of the 1913 Ancient Monuments Act, a landmark in conservation. The present show (until 15 September) examines efforts to protect Georgian Britain during the early 20th century. The Luftwaffe (see Holland House library after an air raid, 1940, above) was nothing compared to rapacious British developers. Photographs show sledgehammers being taken to Adelphi Terrace, from which Robert Adams’s striking doorframe was salvaged.