DECEMBER 2019 – PREHISTORY
In days of yore, when no one knew the difference between an epidemic and a pandemic – apart from epidemiologists, whose job title nobody could yet pronounce – and when no one spoke of social distancing, except perhaps Marxists in reference to Royal Ascot; in that dim a...
Asked for her opinion regarding the coronavirus which had just appeared in China, Dame Jane Goodall, the conservationist and expert on chimpanzees, said it was nature’s way of ‘fighting back’. Can we be surprised if the non-humans we persecute take their revenge?
The scene is the north of...
Davi Kopenawa is the genuine article, a shaman whose dreamworld is attuned to the wonders of the Amazon rainforest. What can he tell us about the damage we are doing to the world?
Over a decade later, I still remember an idyllic scene I once glimpsed from the window of a bus. At the time, I was...
In his twenties, John Constable, the great English landscape painter, fell in love with a woman called Maria Bicknell whom he had known since she was the age of twelve. They exchanged letters that became increasingly passionate, but it was not to be an easy courtship, owing to the opposition of her ...
When the Brexit fever was at its height, and the words ‘febrile’ and ‘torrid’ seemed to be on every pundit’s lips, along with ‘free movement,’ ‘cake and eat it’ and the godawful ‘Brexit’ itself, I read a story about the Pope that really cheered me up. It’s not that I have anything against the pr...
I’ve always had a lot of time for sceptics. In some cases, you had to have a lot of time. There was the one who landed up in a ditch and refused to come out till someone could prove he was actually in it. Mind you, I may have made this particular sceptic up; when I enter the words ‘sceptic’ and ...
The ginger-haired Jesus, by Paul Gauguin.
As a painter, especially in his early years, Gauguin could be remarkably gauche. Given a different chain of events, who knows, he might have founded the Gauche movement in painting, though it’s possible he would never have been able to recogn...
WHAT’S IN A NAME? AN ENTIRE SOAP OPERA, APPARENTLY.
I have always had a problem with the way popular culture has treated the reputation of the most famous of all the pharaohs. It simply lacks decorum, in my view, to refer to the boy king as Tut. Why the familiarity?
The Americans seem to hav...
Scarlett Moffatt flanked by two Himba women
Things here have become very tribal of late. The term has probably never been so fashionable. I just consulted the views of the Observer columnist, Andrew Rawnsley, and yet another example appeared in his very first paragraph:
‘Boris Johnson an...
As I arrived at the press preview for Tate Britain’s new exhibition, I saw the glass cabinets containing the familiar pages of William Blake’s etchings, with their slightly over-neat handwriting and the little illustrations in the style of medieval manuscripts and, I have to admit, my heart sank...
