This is a seriously impressive exhibition. The full title is ‘From Russia: French and Russian Master Paintings 1870-1925 from Moscow and St Petersburg‘. It starts with a little room of Russian paintings from the start of that period; then you get a whole load of French paintings that were collected by two Russian art collectors, [...]
Posts tagged with ‘politics’
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Modernism and politics
25 March 2008 – 10:34 pm
A discussion of modernism and politics starting at Alfred Corn’s, then Baroque in Hackney then George Szirtes here and here.
I suppose we tend to associate modernism with left-wing politics because we feel that people who embrace radical and new aesthetics would probably have radical instincts in politics as well: whatever else modernism was, it [...]
Tippety-tap
20 March 2008 – 10:56 pm
In celebration of this very amusing put-down of President Bush, here’s a bit of the master himself:
1984 by George Orwell
19 March 2008 – 2:11 pm
I picked this up to read again because I’ve just read a biography of Stalin. I think I first read 1984 when I was really quite young — certainly no older than my teens; in fact I may have made a point of reading it in 1984, when I was nine or ten — and [...]
Tibet and the Olympics
16 March 2008 – 11:42 am
It’s going to be really interesting watching the Olympics unfold. There had already been rumblings, with the protests last year in Burma and pressure over Darfur, but protests in Tibet bring it that much closer to home. And as the Olympics get closer, and more and more media attention is focussed on Beijing, the Chinese [...]
Yay for Blasphemy!
7 March 2008 – 9:39 am
Or, to be more exact, yay for legal blasphemy. We’re not quite there yet, but the House of Lords has voted to abolish the offence of blasphemy in British law.
The current situation, with special legal protection for the Church of England, was obviously ludicrous in a modern multicultural society; but then in a country where [...]
‘Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar’ by Simon Sebag Montefiore
3 March 2008 – 12:33 pm
Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar is a biography of Stalin, focussed on his domestic life and the tightly-knit group of people around him: his own family, and politicians, bodyguards, and their families.
As a piece of history, it’s very impressive. It’s clearly the result of a huge amount of research by Montefiore: he [...]
Irony of the week
16 February 2008 – 9:36 am
The Chinese government expressing their sadness and shock at the idea that anyone would be crass enough to sully the Olympic spirit with the grimy taint of a political agenda.
Primarily peculiar
8 January 2008 – 3:35 pm
Is it just me or is the American system of state primaries really bizarre?
And I don’t just mean the Iowan ‘we don’t believe in the secret ballot’ thing. The very fact that the results in Iowa and New Hampshire take on great significance is a clear sign that something isn’t working properly. I mean, no [...]
Those crazy Brits!
30 September 2007 – 4:37 pm
There’s speculation that we might have a general election soon; November 4th was a date I heard suggested on the radio today. Which means, since we don’t have any kind of hand-over period, that we might have a new government and a new Prime Minister on November 5th.
To those of you who live in countries [...]
China, the Olympics, and antiquity diplomacy
28 September 2007 – 12:10 am
I was just watching Question Time on the BBC, and the panel were asked what ‘we’ should do about Burma. Simon Schama was on the panel, and he suggested that, if China was stubborn about blocking any action via the UN, we should have a mass boycott of the Beijing Olympics, since Burma is a [...]
Politician of the day…
26 June 2007 – 9:52 pm
… is Anna Lo, a member of the Northern Ireland Assembly, about whom I know nothing except that she was on the radio today and has the most extraordinary accent I’ve ever heard. I remember hearing a Swede who had lived in Liverpool for some time, and that was quite something, but I think a [...]
‘Imperial Life in the Emerald City’ by Rajiv Chandrasekaran
25 June 2007 – 2:20 pm
Imperial Life in the Emerald City by Rajiv Chandrasekaran has the subtitle ‘Inside Baghdad’s Green Zone’; the Green Zone being the seven square mile compound in Baghdad centered around the Republican Palace, where the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) under L. Paul Bremer III attempted to rule Iraq for about 12 months after the fall of [...]
Yay for Salman
23 June 2007 – 3:21 pm
Some of the response to Rushdie’s knighthood has startled me. Take, for example, this letter to the Times:
Sir, Did the genius who recommended Salman Rushdie for a knighthood not realise the offence that it would cause to the Muslim world after The Satanic Verses debacle or was this calculated? And exactly why did he get [...]
‘The Utility of Force’ by Rupert Smith
22 May 2007 – 1:28 pm
I’ve just finished The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World by General Sir Rupert Smith. Rather admirably, he doesn’t actually use those titles on the cover of the book, but his military background is obviously relevant. He joined the military in 1962, and in the last decade of his service [...]
smoke-filled rooms
15 May 2007 – 8:56 am
I do think it’s funny that the British, so temperamentally disinclined towards conspiracy theories that they even assume that referees are incompetent rather than corrupt, seem ready to believe in a shadowy international conspiracy to fix the result of the Eurovision Song Contest.
EDIT: and after posting that I read that Richard Younger-Ross, the Lib Dem [...]
Pee Rages
13 March 2007 – 1:29 pm
I’m finding the whole ‘cash for honours‘ scandal rather surreal. And not just because there’s something odd about the idea of a sequence of Tony Blair’s close advisers being arrested and government tootling along regardless.
As long as I can remember, it has been an accepted fact of the British political system that people who donate [...]
Continuous Revolution
8 March 2007 – 8:44 am
After only 650 years of a two-chamber parliament, MPs have voted for both Houses to be fully elected.
I just hope we don’t come to regret this headlong rush towards mob rule.
Presidents and small gods
1 February 2007 – 6:22 pm
I’m always puzzled by the fact that, in discussions about abolishing the monarchy, so many people assume it would be necessary to replace the monarch with some kind of president.
To me, ‘king’ suggests a small god. A slight odour of divinity attaches to the idea of a monarch which is sets it apart from other [...]
Justice, diplomacy and realpolitik
18 December 2006 – 2:58 am
The other day I was watching some pundits punditing away about the killing of Alexander Litvinenko, and one of them, to general approval from the audience, said some thing to the effect that if the evidence did point to an assassination ordered by the Russian government, ‘diplomacy must not be allowed to obstruct justice’.
I think [...]