The art of self determination

January 30, 2024

One of the shows of the year (any year). How the new nations used art to express their identity after World War One

When winning is losing

January 30, 2024

Exhibition at the Army Museum in Paris gets us in the mood for the agony and ecstasy of the Olympic Games which the city is staging this year.

Victory parade under the Arc de Triumph at end of World War One

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In full flow

December 26, 2023

An insight into a brief, charming interlude in the lives of Van Gogh, Seurat, Signac and co.

The strange, ordinary world of Lisetta Carmi

November 7, 2023

I come across the most eccentric, most brilliant people in the art world. Here’s another. What could be more remarkable than saying you would have wanted to be taken to a concentration camp to learn how better to help others?

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Fake views

October 9, 2023

Brilliant small show at the Courtauld (that brilliant small gallery) about the arts and craftiness of the fakes and forgers over the centuries.

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The big ice is sick

August 17, 2023

Dramatic images expose the perils and privations facing the people of the Arctic region as global warming takes a grip.

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Pure Sadism finding an image to go with this!

July 10, 2023

Can too much freedom lead to evil? Discuss.

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When the fighting has moved on...

June 25, 2023

There are many brave, inventive, photographers of war. But few capture the pathos, the suffering and the quiet dignity of the victims as well as Ivor Prickett.

Read more: https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/no-home-from-war-images-of-conflict-survival-and-loss/

Two above: Syrian refugees.
Below the grieving woman in Mosul

One for the Home Secretary

May 3, 2023

This exhibition at the Fitzwilliam, Cambridge, was not at all what I expected.

Read all about it:

Less is more

March 16, 2023

I first came across the Italian artist Giorgio Morandi in a gallery on an island near Stockholm, artfully called the Artepeligo. He was teamed with actual potteries by Edmund de Waal and the result was quietly breathtaking. Here he is by himself.

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The violence behind the quiet

December 23, 2022

I meet many impressive people in the world of arts but Anne de Henning is right up there for sheer bravado - not to mention talent. Read all about her: https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/the-woman-who-shot-war/

Lost and found in Lithuania

November 13, 2022

I had never been to Lithuania and knew little about its art scene. It ranges from the ethereal to the decidedly gritty via the bold and radical Henrikas Natalevičius, MK Čiurlionis, Dorothy Bohm, Rimaldas Vikšraitis. And much, much more.

Read:

https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/revealing-the-lost-art-of-lithuania/

Well, did they?

October 24, 2022

The terrific Newlands Gallery in Petworth, Sussex, has a collection of photographs and paintings tracing the relationship of the incomparable Lee miller and the nonpareil that was Picasso. Were they lovers? We’ll never know.

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Mornings have broken

October 14, 2022

I sit next to Paul Raftery at Fratton Park, home to the ever-disappointing Portsmouth FC. In the many longueurs of a game we talk photography. This is his latest very classy exhibition.

See more: https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/behind-the-curtain-a-new-dawn/

Mr Turner uncovered

September 4, 2022

My view of the artist Turner’s love life was clouded by his unlovely portrayal in the Mike Leigh film, Mr Turner. The truth is more nuanced and harder to identify.

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Better late than never

September 4, 2022

Visited Bruges in Belgium a few years ago. Delightful. But surprised to find a museum dedicated to Frank Brangwyn - a man of parts if ever there there was. Doesn’t get the approbation he deserves but does have an exhibition of one of his major projects at the Ditching Gallery in deepest Sussex.

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War made absurd

August 25, 2022

Few cartoonists are more English than Heath Robinson. So very Dads Army, so PG Wodehouse. Yet unlike them his gentle satire had a sting. A sting which more aggressive cartoonists would recognise as being on the side of finding the truth. Read more:

A place to swear by

May 28, 2022

Procida, an island in the Bay of Naples is a joy. Spared the worst of the crowds which flock to Ischia, Capri and Sorrento it has a clear sense of its identity. It relies on fishing - as the fabulous sea food testifies - and maritime work for its income and on tourism. Actually, the people there told me on a number of occasions that they don’t want too many tourists which makes their bid to become Italy’s Capital of Culture hard to understand. Anyway, the headline in The New European says it all.

The picture shows the view from the old prison high on a bluff above the two main ports. I wondered if the blue skies and inviting seas cheered the inmates or made them even more frustrated and depressed.

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PS I don’t write the headlines!

Doomed to be too beautiful

May 7, 2022

I spent the best part of three months in Venice some years ago. How little has changed - superficially at least - and how much transformed for the worst. Read more:

Zen and the art of a painting a picture.

March 31, 2022

Meet Jock McFadyen’ artist, talker and lover of motorbikes

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FIVE GREAT NEW HISTORICAL BOOKS

New European, May 28, 2020

Voices of the Mayflower by Richard Holledge

July marks the 400 years since a motley bunch of people sailed across the Atlantic to the New World on a surprisingly small tub called the Mayflower. Among the many books and programmes commemorating the anniversary few will have the human insight of this, in which Holledge brings the voyage to life with an account that is not quite fact but not completely fiction either. As ever the best history is told though individual stories and Holledge’s imagined voices speak to us eloquently down the centuries.’

The Scattered; a saga of suffering and survival

Love lost; love regained. Freedom; oppression. The casual cruelty of great nations; the plight of the weak and dispossessed. And against all hope—survival and a new life.

The Scattered dramatizes the incredible life of one man and the people he loved, caught up in the saga that befell the Acadians, a simple, peaceable people, who were expelled by the British from their homes in Nova Scotia, Canada, in 1755. The great powers—France and Britain—were caught up in a titanic battle for power in North America. The small enclave of French-speaking Acadians were in the way and were brushed aside.

To find out more, please go to The Scattered at Amazon

Here's a book for anyone who endured - or enjoyed -working in British national newspapers over the past 30-plus years.

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/arnie-wilson/reverse-ferret-a-fleet-st_b_9538290.html

Aah, takes me back … to the days of four-day weeks, long liquid lunches, typewriters, spikes and sub-editors. Before desks became workstations, shorthand gave way to Dictaphones and then iPhones, and when every good reporter had his own Deep Throat inside the police force.

It probably takes a Fleet Street veteran to identify the inspiration for the title of this novel. Like me, anyone who was there in the 1980s might think they can identify some of the real-life journalists thinly-disguised as characters in this gloriously funny and racy romp - even though their names have been stolen or adapted from locations in Manchester - Hazel Grove, Miles Platting, Clough Boggart for a start.

But I was brought to a full stop (or should I say ‘point, new par’?) when I realised I was present at an event which becomes quite central to the plot. It was one of those ‘think tanks’ - or drink tanks - that used to be a popular excuse to combine a weekend in a luxury hotel, often with its own golf course, with a brief spell of brainstorming. I think I may even have had a hand in organising this one, at Hever Castle, one-time home of Anne Boleyn.

It was at that moment I realised that the W.M.Boot credited as the author was not only someone familiar with the inner workings of long-lost Fleet Street AND Evelyn Waugh’s ‘Scoop’ but also someone I had worked alongside. It took me a while but I eventually figured out who he (or she) is, and I am sworn to secrecy. Although anyone familiar with Humbert Wolfe’s view of British journalists will know that it might not take too much persuasion to get me to reveal all.

Regardless of my own involvement in the story, and my acquaintance with the author and his characters, this is a thoroughly enjoyable read and a realistic insight behind the scenes of tabloid newspapers before they were eviscerated by a combination of Leveson and the internet. When journalists were more interested in tippling than tweeting, and for whom sex was more important than selfies.

It was published just over a year ago and I can’t believe it has not been reviewed by Press Gazette or on the media pages of The Guardian. It deserves a wider audience - beyond those who can say ‘I was there.”

*********

This is an hilarious book on the excesses of Fleet Street. I thought the phone hacking scandal was bad enough but this is an often rumbustious dive into murky waters or crime, venality, huge egos and lots of sex. Racism, sexism, alcoholism - it’s all here.

But it is more than just a kiss and tell. It is something of a morality tale in which the hero fulfils his ambition - but at a terrible price. I really enjoyed the uncomfortable mix of satire and seriousness.

******

Jonathan

5.0 out of 5 stars

Putting the Boot into Fleet Street

Enjoyed this review by fellow hack Arnie Wilson, spotted on Huffington Post (see above)

"Reverse Ferret is a book about Fleet Street. And the suspicious, somewhat sexually explicit death – was it murder? – of the editor of the mythical “Sunday Chronicle”.

Not just any book about London’s famous (former) national newspaper HQ but one of the best – racy, intelligent, witty, slick, and so tightly crafted that it almost needs oxygen in order to breathe. What a shame that most readers aged - shall we say under 40 – might understand the naughty bits but won’t really understand the best bits (although these are sometimes one and the same). Nor will they really register the news events or even the TV programmes of the age – the Falklands War, for example. Or Dirty Den. Or even the Page 3 girl “Luscious Lovely Linda Lusardi”.

Fleet Street and its reporters’ modus operandi (long alcoholic lunches, typewriters, and the chance to actually get out of the office and meet real people instead of so often relying these days on sandwiches at your desk, email press releases and interviews) is no more.

Reverse ferret is a phrase “used predominantly within the British media to describe a sudden reversal in an organisation's editorial line on a certain issue - and generally, this will involve no acknowledgement of the previous position”. The term apparently originates from Kelvin MacKenzie's time at The “soaraway” Sun – sometimes known as the “current bun”. And if ever the swashbuckling nature of Fleet Street of the 1980s could ever be captured in a single real-life character it was MacKenzie!

W.M. Boot is not, of course, the author’s real name. (And is not related to William Boot, the fictional journalist in the 1938 Evelyn Waugh comic novel Scoop). But I know who he or she is - a chum who gave me my first ever taste of Fleet Street in the ‘70s. Thanks Boot. I won’t put the boot in my naming you since some of the characters in Reverse Ferret are known to both of us and might be unhappy with their portrayal! Suffice it to say that Boot was an executive on several national newspapers - the Daily and Sunday Mirror, The European, Today, the late lamented Independent and the Times. Among others. And I know of one “other” in particular, but I won’t give the game away.

What does amaze me is the obviously superior classical education that Boot was able to conceal from us when working on some of our saucier stories. Where DID Boot learn that vast academic knowledge? Not in Fleet Street that’s for sure!

Boot certainly bears no resemblance to Miles Platting, a character in the book “whose career as a showbiz writer had spiralled into drunken oblivion after his wife had left him for a young reporter she met at a Chronicle office party.

“He missed deadlines, failed to turn up at interviews, and when he did, invariably had a row with the star. As Tarquin (another character in the book) put it: ‘The Man The Stars Talk To became The Hack The Stars Do Their Best To Run A Mile From’.

One of the funniest characters in Reverse Ferret is a slimy and corrupt policeman, Inspector Dennis Droyle who “had the disconcerting habit of adding an aitch at the most unpredictable moments in what was presumably an attempt to shun the ‘ello ‘ello stereotype of the TV copper, but any attempt at gravity was vitiated by his voice, a high-pitched, adenoidal whine”.

Example: “Hi must say – I rather thought you National newspaper journalists would be living in a more hopulent suite of offices than this.”

But Boot writes: “Hopulent they were not. The features staff were packed together as tightly as a traffic jam on the new M25. There were seven of them in theory, sharing a hugger mugger of desks, bedecked with dirty mugs that nurtured vivid biospecimens , pots of glue and chewed Biros, hemmed in by overflowing waste bins (and), stacks of newspapers”.

Sooner or later, of course, on-screen technology would seep like a virus into all newspaper offices including the “Chronic”. There was a “charge against change” from the staff who “wanted to stay working as they always had, tapping at their typewriters, using paper, ballpoints, scissors and glue. They relished the familiarity of the office, with its smell of damp page proofs, the background clatter of the Linotype machines, the rumble of the presses. If it was good enough for Caxton, it was good enough for them.”

Sadly (perhaps) it was not to be. But with hindsight, Fleet Street was always good fun. Thanks, Boot, for reminding us. And that “heditor” who died? Was it murder? You’ll have to read the book to henlighten yourselves!

– Arnie Wilson

*******

Subs desk

A book that takes you back to the Valpolicella-fuelled newsrooms of the 1980s. Deftly-plotted and highly entertaining with a cast of characters that will be familiar to those who were around at the time.

Who listens?

Who hears?

The Acadian tragedy

260 years on

My old friend Arnie Wilson had this to say in his Huffington Post blog: http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/arnie-wilson/the-scattered-by-richard-holledge_b_7878142.html