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

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nginx/1.17.10 recalled a chance meeting in front of the Parthenon marbles with a young man who confessed: “This Greek stuff doesn’t move me one bit”.

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When Dodds asked him why, he replied: “Well, it’s all so terribly rational, if you […]

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

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nginx/1.17.10 a book on our doorstep. We have got used to acts of

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kindness from strangers; at the start of lockdown another neighbour posted a book of poetry through our door to cheer us up. My 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 loose end. April comes around and you’re stuck at home with your furloughed

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nginx/1.17.10 partner watching your gerbils spin around on the rolly

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

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

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nginx/1.17.10 behind an airport queue management system. “You’re preparing for an invasion,” I joshed with a cashier as I emerged from the press view

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on 10 March. “We’re prepared for anything,” he replied. What they weren’t prepared for was nothing, which – […]

Laura Gascoigne March/April 2020 Large woman to much smaller man at a party:

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nginx/1.17.10 “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

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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

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nginx/1.17.10 2019 The buzz of 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 guitar tuning up, followed by a smoky

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

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nginx/1.17.10 gold remains universal”. To prove it, the auction house promised to take

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collectors “on a journey through the great civilisations […]

Laura Gascoigne September/October 2019 Among the many examples of the wit and wisdom of Sir Thomas Beecham is the story of the great conductor seeing a tombstone inscribed: “Here

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lies a great organist and an excellent musician”

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nginx/1.17.10 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 July/August 2019 It’s hard to

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nginx/1.17.10 know where to start with Ingres’s definition when nobody knows any

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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 […]

Laura Gascoigne May/June 2019 In

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nginx/1.17.10 2014 the Harvard-based science magazine Annals of Improbable Research presented its Ig Nobel prize for neuroscience to a team of researchers from China and Canada who demonstrated that seeing

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the face 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 […]