To approach Brideshead Revisited is to enter a layered architecture: a country house that is also a theology, a love story that is also a meditation on class, and a memoir that is also an argument about memory. Evelyn Waugh published the novel in 1945, in the wreckage of war and rationing; he later prunedContinue reading “Brideshead Revisited: Memory, Grace, and the Politics of Nostalgia”
Category Archives: Blog
Cool Britannia: Art, Attitude, and the London of the 1990s
It was the summer of 1997 and Downing Street had turned into a nightclub. Tony Blair, barely weeks into his premiership, was playing host not to diplomats but to designers, artists, models, and rock stars. In the garden, Kate Moss smoked cigarettes with Noel Gallagher of Oasis. Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst, the enfant terriblesContinue reading “Cool Britannia: Art, Attitude, and the London of the 1990s”
Yves Saint Laurent: The Couturier Who Changed Fashion Forever
Few designers embody the idea of fashion as both art and revolution as completely as Yves Saint Laurent. For nearly half a century, he not only dressed women but reshaped the language of femininity, sexuality, and power. His designs were not merely clothes; they were statements — about liberation, about modernity, about the capacity ofContinue reading “Yves Saint Laurent: The Couturier Who Changed Fashion Forever”
Living in Silence
Makers & Rooms Ivan Van Mossevelde built a house of raw concrete in the Flemish countryside in 1972 for an art collector who filled it with Judd and Sol LeWitt. Decades later, a young architect spotted it through the trees during a walk, was refused entry, and spent years waiting for it to come toContinue reading “Living in Silence”
Martha Gellhorn: The War Correspondent Who Refused to Be a Footnote
Martha Gellhorn never liked being remembered as Ernest Hemingway’s wife. She was, as she often reminded anyone who asked, “a writer before I met him, and a writer after I left him.” Indeed, over the course of nearly six decades, Gellhorn became one of the 20th century’s most formidable war correspondents—a woman who witnessed theContinue reading “Martha Gellhorn: The War Correspondent Who Refused to Be a Footnote”
In Times of Dragons: Tori Amos and the Mythology of Now
By Bergotte The opening line of Tori Amos’s eighteenth studio album is a command: “Shush yourself, down now.” It comes from the album’s antagonist — the “sadistic billionaire Lizard Demon husband” from whose penthouse the album’s protagonist is fleeing — and it is the most precisely chosen opening gambit she has made since the firstContinue reading “In Times of Dragons: Tori Amos and the Mythology of Now”
Les Lalanne: Where Surrealism Meets Design
In the half-century arc of 20th-century design, few names shimmer with such eccentric magnetism as Les Lalanne. François-Xavier (1927–2008) and Claude (1924–2019) Lalanne were not just artists, not just designers—they were dreamers who translated the surreal into functional form. Their creations—sheep that double as stools, a cabbage sprouting chicken legs, gilded apples, and fantastical brassContinue reading “Les Lalanne: Where Surrealism Meets Design”
Ella Fitzgerald: The Architecture of Song
To speak of Ella Fitzgerald is to speak of precision, clarity, and grace so absolute that they verge on the metaphysical. Born in Newport News, Virginia, in 1917 and raised in Yonkers, Fitzgerald emerged from poverty and the turbulence of her early life to become one of the most celebrated voices of the twentieth century.Continue reading “Ella Fitzgerald: The Architecture of Song”
Dead Poets Society: The Inner Life and the Call Beyond
I remember first watching Dead Poets Society in fifth form. As a child with a rich inner life and a yearning for life beyond the school gates, and to meet people outside of village life who were worldly and exciting, this film hit me right where it changes things. For teenagers with such inward intensity,Continue reading “Dead Poets Society: The Inner Life and the Call Beyond”
A Hundred Years of Wonder: David Attenborough at One Hundred
He gave three generations of human beings their understanding of the natural world. He did it with patience, with rigour, and with a quality of attention so rare it functions, in an age of noise, almost like a form of grace. By Bergotte On the eighth of May 1926, in Isleworth, Middlesex, a child wasContinue reading “A Hundred Years of Wonder: David Attenborough at One Hundred”
My World of Interiors 