Laura Gascoigne In April Lionel Messi put a signed pair of his adidas nginx football boots up for auction at Christie’s. Customised

301 Moved Permanently

with the names of his wife and sons, they were the ‘game-worn’ boots in which the Barcelona striker scored his 644th goal for his club, beating Pele’s previous record of 643 for

---

nginx Santos. Perfumed with the player’s DNA, […]

301 Moved

---

nginx Permanently 301 Moved

301 Moved Permanently

Permanently nginx

Laura Gascoigne November/December 2020

---

nginx In the introduction to his 1951 book The Greeks and the Irrational, the

301 Moved Permanently

classicist E R Dodds 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”. 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 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

---

nginx of poetry through our door to cheer us up. My husband read it, and it did. But this book was different, as

301 Moved Permanently

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 partner watching your gerbils spin around on the rolly

---

nginx wheel of life when an idea strikes you. Why should your pets enjoy

301 Moved Permanently

normality as […]

Laura Gascoigne May/June

301 Moved Permanently

2020 At the 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,” I joshed with a cashier as I emerged from the press

---

nginx view 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: “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 his pen: the fight in the grocery, the battle on the stairs;

301 Moved Permanently

the rout where the

---

nginx men have the women […]

Laura Gascoigne January/February 2019 The buzz of anticipation in the COL

301 Moved Permanently

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 voice: “I’m going to ask one question before we start: Are y’all experienced?”

---

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

301 Moved Permanently

collectors “on a 301 Moved Permanently journey

---

nginx through […]

Laura Gascoigne September/October 2019 Among the many examples of the wit

---

nginx and wisdom nginx of Sir Thomas 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,

301 Moved Permanently

a contributor to […]