Alexander Adams “Was Lt Columbo’s name really Frank? We’ve all seen the freeze-frame

---

nginx/1.21.1 close-ups of Columbo’s ID badge which states that his first name is ‘Frank”. But should we consider this canonical?” I’m becoming more and more confused

404 Not Found

by this ‘canonical’ business. The above is from Columbophile website. I love his joke about the Jewish lady who was walking down […]

Michael Daley Questions proliferate on the disappeared $450 million Leonardo Salvator Mundi. Where is it? Who owns it? Who still believes it a Leonardo? Will

404 Not Found

it be exhibited this year at the Paris Louvre’s big Leonardo exhibition, as promised? Can it be true,

---

nginx/1.21.1 as an artnet blogger now claims (on the claimed say-so of “two principals involved in” Christie’s 2017 […]

Michael Daley Fans of

---

nginx/1.21.1 Tacita Dean will be delighted to learn that she is having yet another exhibition, this time at the Royal Academy… And it’s well up to her usual standard. This

404 Not Found

time she is “exploring the genre of landscape in the broadest sense.” Well, broad is the word. She’s blown up a number of black and white photos […]

Dick French November/December 2020 Rebecca Cains has died. She was only 50. “Death lies

---

nginx/1.21.1 on her like an untimely frost.” Also known as “Becky the Scrapyard Queen” on account

404 Not Found

of the subject matter of her paintings – mostly wrecked cars and vans on roads or in scrapyards. She showed occasionally at the Royal Academy and frequently at Mall Galleries, where, […]

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

---

nginx/1.21.1 chance meeting in front of the

404 Not Found

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

---

nginx/1.21.1 used that cupboard under the stairs while waiting for one of those posh penthouses over the road to be readied for

404 Not Found

him. Although it is true that he was reluctant to leave after falling for the abundant charms of barmaid […]

Dick French July/August 2020 Reading Pepys again about the plague of 1666. Not one for self-isolating, he was still enthusiastically putting it

404 Not Found

about: “Thence to Betty Martin and there did tout ce que je voudrais avec her and 404

---

nginx/1.21.1 Not Found drank and away by water, home and to dinner. Down to Deptford, loaded half my goods and sent them […]

Laura Gascoigne September/October 2020 Six weeks ago, a

404 Not Found

Hampstead neighbour left a book on our doorstep. We have got used to acts of kindness from strangers; at the start of lockdown another neighbour posted a book of poetry through our door to cheer us up. My

---

nginx/1.21.1 husband read it, and it did. But this book was different, as was its […]

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

404 Not Found

loose end. April comes around and you’re stuck at home with your furloughed partner watching your gerbils spin around on the rolly wheel

---

nginx/1.21.1 of life when an idea strikes you. Why should your pets enjoy normality as […]

Dick French May/June 2020 It’s interesting to read the letters of John

404 Not Found

Ruskin alongside

---

nginx/1.21.1 those of Vincent van Gogh. Most people are aware that Ruskin became rather unbalanced with age, but from reading his correspondence with Euphemia (Effie) it seems to me he was quite mad from the start. It’s the manic density that impresses as much as the content. […]