Laura Gascoigne May/June 2020 At the exit to Tate Modern’s Andy Warhol exhibition, the gift shop tills were barricaded behind an airport

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queue management system. “You’re preparing for an invasion,” I joshed with a cashier as I emerged

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nginx/1.21.1 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 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

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nginx/1.21.1 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

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the Thucydides of the gender war, dissecting

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nginx/1.21.1 its battlegrounds, victories and reversals with his pen: the fight in the grocery, the battle on the stairs; the rout where the men have the women […]

Laura Gascoigne January/February 2019 The buzz of

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nginx/1.21.1 anticipation in the COL Ballroom in Davenport Iowa is audible, the audience murmurating like a flock of starlings; then the first twangs of an electric

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guitar tuning up, followed by a smoky voice: “I’m going to ask one question before we start: Are y’all experienced?” “Yeah!” roars the crowd, unleashing a 10-minute guitar […]

Laura Gascoigne November/December 2019 In October of last year, under the title ‘The Midas Touch’, Sotheby’s held a special sale of

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nginx/1.21.1 ‘objets de vertu’ made of gold. “In a world that speaks 6,900 languages,” cooed the catalogue, “the language of

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gold remains universal”. To prove it, the auction house promised to take collectors “on a journey through the great civilisations […]

Laura Gascoigne September/October

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nginx/1.21.1 2019 Among the many examples of the wit and wisdom of Sir Thomas

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Beecham is the story of the great conductor seeing a tombstone inscribed: “Here lies a great organist and an excellent musician” and remarking in surprise: “What, both in the same grave?”  I was reminded of this when seeing Wafic Saïd, a contributor to Boris […]

Laura Gascoigne

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July/August 2019 It’s hard to know where

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nginx/1.21.1 to start with Ingres’s definition when nobody knows any more what probity means. And yet drawing is enjoying a resurgence. What is going on? When David Hockney breezed into the Royal College from Bradford in 1959, he announced his arrival not with naïve etchings of naughty gay boys but with a […]

Advocating life drawing at art school is a deeply conservative and reactionary position. Arguments in favour of life drawing usually fall into one of two camps (or

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nginx/1.21.1 sometimes both). I am utterly unconvinced by both. The first, and weaker, argument contends that it is necessary to learn

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the rules before you can break them. This is an authoritarian position where […]

Laura Gascoigne May/June 2019 In 2014 the Harvard-based science magazine Annals

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of Improbable Research presented its Ig Nobel prize for neuroscience to a team of researchers from China and Canada who demonstrated that seeing the face

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nginx/1.21.1 of Christ in a slice of burnt toast is perfectly OK. (That year’s Ig Nobel prize for economics went to the Italian government for […]

So, as all cool sentences begin, I think that the best

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nginx/1.21.1 TV programme I saw last was Addicted to Sheep. In many ways this BBC4 documentary was reminiscent of the French film Être et Avoir about a remarkable teacher in a school in the remote Auvergne, although a good deal less winsome.

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It focused on the lives of 404 Not […]