Culture

Like an ex-politician with a hot take on Brexit, Game of Thrones is back. The first episode of this seventh, and penultimate, series – ‘Dragonstone’ – saw the entire ensemble of familiar faces return, as the finely poised situation in the show was laid out for all to see. The first six seasons charted the War of the Five Kings, but now, with the Targaryen heir returned to Westeros, and the White Walkers almost at The Wall, we are heading towards the War of the Two Wars – and ‘Dragonstone’ is the start of an inexorable motion towards the show’s final showdown. But by Game of Thrones’s own rollicking standards, ‘Dragonstone’ moves at a rather glacial pace.

We routinely feel emotional about materials — often subliminally. Which is why new substances and techniques for manufacturing have provoked vivid writing, particularly during the design-reform debates of the 19th century. Think of John Ruskin on the evils of cut as opposed to blown glass or his views on wrought iron as opposed to cast iron — the latter emblematic in his view of a ‘sophisticated, unkind, uncomfortable, unprincipled society’. For the designer Gottfried Semper man’s very inventiveness was a loss. We were losing our understanding of discrete materials. Then there was, and is, our perfectly justified anxieties about the plastics family, beautifully chronicled in Jeffrey Meikle’s American Plastic: A Cultural History.

Antony Gormley is not amused. The artist who has installed hundreds of life-sized, cast-iron sculptures of his naked body in cities all over the world is affronted with the way a mysterious member of the British public has responded to one of the artworks. The piece in question, which could be known as ‘Narcissism’ but is in fact called ‘Another Place', consists of 100 figures, spread over 2 miles of coastline, on Crosby Beach, north of central Liverpool, looking out to sea. Someone has given it a make over: at least nine of the statues were recently adorned. One, standing upright at just over 6 feet tall, appears to be wearing a fetching pink polka-dot bikini, with a male appendage; another a pair of bright orange shorts.

Last week the exhibition Painting India by the late Howard Hodgkin opened at the Hepworth Wakefield. Hodgkin started collecting Indian miniatures as a schoolboy at Eton and first visited the subcontinent in 1964, travelling with Robert Skelton, the then assistant keeper of the Indian collection at the V&A. Hodgkin would return there many times during his life. He would later say to David Sylvester 'I think my main reason for going back to India is because it is somewhere else.' The exhibition at the Hepworth features over 35 works by Hodgkin which take their cue from his visits. The promotional text on the museum’s website notes that the exhibition 'takes place as part of the UK-India Year of Culture', a year long initiative that features exhibitions and events throughout the UK.

It was most odd. Four decades after I’d walked into the Sun to start my first shift as a news sub editor, I was sitting in a small theatre in the heart of La La Labour-land (the Almeida in Corbyn’s Islington) watching a play where I knew all the characters, as I both worked with them and worshipped them. There was Rupert Murdoch. There was Sun editor Larry Lamb, his deputy Bernard Shrimsley, Page Three photographer Beverley Goodway, and even production supremo Ray Mills who, due to his northern background, was known as Biffo — Big Ignorant Fucker From Oldham. How much would that acronym be worth at an employment tribunal today?