Juliet Rix

Thursday

Juliet Rix

A Gyptian weekend

From our UK edition

Philip Pullman’s latest missal, La Belle Sauvage, once again features the boat-dwelling Gyptians. Rough and honourable, they emerge from the waterways of Brytain to help the heroine Lyra, before disappearing back to their watery world, one that runs through Lyra’s, but is separate and different from it. After a long weekend on the canals in the heart of Britain, I feel I have been drifting in Pullman’s wake. ‘Just steer her in here,’ says the boatman. We are new to the canals, so he is taking us through the first lock. ‘Straight in’. He must be joking: only one lock gate is open. The gap is about six inches wider than the boat. But his weathered face is completely straight — and completely calm. Deep breath.

Thursday

Juliet Rix

A century of De Stijl

From our UK edition

It starts as soon as I arrive. In Den Haag Centraal railway station, the kiosks, windows, lift shaft, piano and even the hoarding on the building site outside, are all cheerfully decked out in red, blue and yellow rectangles, black lines and an occasional patch of straight-sided white. Holland’s capital has gone Mondrian mad; the style of De Stijl (the modernist art movement to which he belonged) is plastered all over town, indeed over much of the country. Holland is in the grip of ‘Mondrian to Dutch Design: 100 Years of De Stijl’, a year celebrating its ‘most important contribution to the 20th century’. De Stijl’s influence is everywhere.