Culture

The Blyth Gallery is situated in the Sherfield Building, deep in the South Kensington campus of Imperial College London. The Sherfield Building is a labyrinth of concrete, linoleum and glass. Its atmosphere is oppressively institutional. You walk around to the percussion of slamming fire doors and the click-clock of unseen footsteps. The air carries the faint scent of yesterday’s boiled vegetables. It’s an unprepossessing place. The gallery is up on the fifth floor, in an anteroom between the lobby outside the central lifts and the Seminar and Learning Centre. There is no natural light. The floor is bare. The walls are white. A partition splits the room in half.

Spoiler alert: this is a review of last night's episode Anyone watching Game of Thrones for the first time last night would not have been dissuaded of Peter Hitchens’ argument that the show is cruel and will promote cruelty. It opened with Lord Bolton’s bastard Ramsay Snow, who in the last series did that thing with Theon Greyjoy we shall not talk about, chasing and torturing some poor woman before showing off his new eunuch – now called Reek – to his sinister father.

The suggestion, made by the poet Michael Rosen and others, that Sajid Javid is not sufficiently cultured to be Culture Secretary is as ludicrous as it is pompous. The secretary of state does not write poetry – even bad poetry. He decides how best to make the arts flourish, both as a source of spiritual value and revenue. Therein is a challenge – one that his predecessors have failed to meet. The nadir of Maria Miller’s lamentable ministerial career was not her recent non-apology or even the episode which saw her advisor appear to threaten a newspaper. No, it was the speech on culture in the age of austerity she gave last summer.

How important is William Kent (1685–1748)? He’s not exactly a household name and yet this English painter and architect, apprenticed to a Hull coach-painter before he was sent to Italy (as a kind of cultural finishing school) by a group of patrons who recognised his abilities, became the chief architectural impresario and interior decorator to the early Georgian nobility. His Italian studies made him a devoted Palladian, and in partnership with his principal collaborator Lord Burlington he set about transplanting the architectural principles and beliefs of Andrea Palladio to the English countryside. He was probably a better ideas man than artist (the Damien Hirst of his day, perhaps?), but he had access to the finest craftsmen, who could execute his plans to great effect.

The arts world will not shed a tear at the news that Maria Miller has resigned. Though it was Jeremy Hunt who wielded the axe to the arts budget, it was Maria Miller who spearheaded a shift in philosophy in the Department of Culture, Media and Sport that arguably annoyed the luvvies even more than the cuts had done. Breaking the only rule that the arts world still deem sacred, Miller demanded, in her only keynote arts speech last April, that culture ditched the art-for-art's-sake argument for its existence and replace it with an art-for-the-economy's-sake argument. 'When times are tough and money is tight, our focus must be on culture's economic impact,' she said.

When I was a boy I used to love the stories of the old kings of England, devouring book after book on the subject until I could rather involuntarily memorise all the dates (which has stuck with me, useless though this knowledge is, and stretches back before the Conquest, although once we get to the Edwys and Edwigs it gets a bit blurry). My fascination with this long, bloody tale was not just an early indicator that I was a massive social inadequate, although that may be part of it; I loved those stories because they were fantastic. And as Game of Thrones starts tonight I’m comforted by the fact that I am not alone - for Thrones is essentially the Our Island Story for the HBO generation.

In 1857, the National Gallery’s pioneering director Sir Charles Eastlake bought one of Veronese’s most sumptuous paintings, ‘The Family of Darius before Alexander’. The purchase was met with strident and very personal opposition from a Tory, Lord Elcho, in the House of Commons, but his objections were swatted aside by Lord Palmerston and we were spared the irony of fighting to defend the Indian empire while rejecting the opportunity to buy the finest painted celebration of imperial conquest. ‘The Family of Darius before Alexander’ is the centrepiece of the first monographic show in this country dedicated to Veronese (until 15 June). This is the sort of triumphant exhibition that the National Gallery does so well.