Laura Gascoigne November/December 2020 In the introduction to his 1951 book The Greeks and the Irrational, the classicist E

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R Dodds recalled a chance meeting in front

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nginx/1.17.10 of the Parthenon marbles with a young man who confessed: “This Greek stuff doesn’t move me one bit”. When Dodds asked him why, he replied: “Well, it’s all so terribly rational, if you […]

Dick French September/October 2020 It’s not true that King Juan Carlos is hiding out in Bradley’s Spanish Bar. He only used that cupboard

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nginx/1.17.10 under the stairs while waiting for one of those posh penthouses over the road to be readied for him. Although it is true that he was reluctant to leave after falling

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for the abundant charms of barmaid […]

Dick French July/August 2020 Reading Pepys again about the plague

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of 1666. Not one for self-isolating, he was still enthusiastically putting it about: “Thence to Betty Martin and there did tout ce que je voudrais avec her and drank and away by water,

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nginx/1.17.10 home and to dinner. Down to Deptford, loaded half my goods and sent them away into safekeeping.” […]

Laura Gascoigne September/October 2020 Six weeks ago, a Hampstead neighbour left a book

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nginx/1.17.10 on our doorstep. We have got used to acts of kindness from strangers;

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at the start of lockdown another neighbour posted a book of poetry 404 Not Found through our door to cheer us up. My husband read it, and it did. But this book was different, […]

Laura Gascoigne July/August 2020 You’re a curator working at the V&A, and the place shuts down. What do you do? You’re at a loose end. April comes around and you’re stuck at home with your furloughed partner watching your gerbils spin around on the rolly wheel of life when an

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idea strikes you. Why should your pets

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nginx/1.17.10 enjoy normality as […]

Dick French May/June 2020 It’s interesting to read the letters of John Ruskin alongside those of Vincent van Gogh. Most people are aware that Ruskin became rather unbalanced with age, but from reading his correspondence with Euphemia (Effie)

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nginx/1.17.10 it seems to

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me he was quite mad from the start. It’s the manic density that impresses as much as the content. […]

Laura Gascoigne May/June 2020 At the

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exit to Tate Modern’s Andy Warhol exhibition, the gift shop tills were barricaded behind an airport queue management system. “You’re preparing for an invasion,”

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nginx/1.17.10 I joshed with a cashier as I emerged from the press view on 10 March. “We’re prepared for anything,” he replied. What they weren’t prepared for was nothing, which – […]

Dick French March/April 2020 Who now remembers the

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nginx/1.17.10 fashion for wearing two pairs of trousers? It was all the rage in Camden Town twenty years ago but you seldom see it now. The outer pair would be cut at the knee to reveal the underlying pair. There’s one chap on Queen’s Crescent who carries on the tradition.

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Apart from the […]

Laura Gascoigne March/April 2020 Large woman to much smaller man at a party: “I love the idea of there being two sexes, don’t you?” James Thurber was the Thucydides of the gender war, dissecting its battlegrounds, victories and reversals with

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nginx/1.17.10 his pen: the fight in the grocery, the battle on the stairs; the rout where the men have the women

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[…]

Laura Gascoigne January/February 2019

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nginx/1.17.10 The buzz of anticipation in the COL Ballroom in Davenport Iowa is audible, the audience murmurating like a flock of starlings; then the 404 Not Found first twangs of an electric guitar tuning up, followed by a smoky voice: “I’m going to ask one question before we start:

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Are y’all experienced?” “Yeah!” roars the crowd, unleashing […]