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? ...
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? ...
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...
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...
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’...
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 rec...
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...
