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

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nginx/1.21.1 Customised with the names of his wife and sons, they were the ‘game-worn’ boots in which the Barcelona striker

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scored his 644th goal for his club, beating Pele’s previous record of 643 for Santos. Perfumed with the player’s DNA, they […]

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

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nginx/1.21.1 a chance meeting

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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: 404 Not Found “Well, it’s all so terribly […]

Laura Gascoigne September/October 2020 Six weeks ago, a Hampstead neighbour left a book on our doorstep. We

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nginx/1.21.1 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

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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 partner watching

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your gerbils spin around on the rolly wheel of life when an idea strikes you. Why should your pets enjoy normality

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nginx/1.21.1 as […]

Laura Gascoigne

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May/June 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

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nginx/1.21.1 for an invasion,” 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 – […]

Laura Gascoigne March/April 2020

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nginx/1.21.1 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

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the grocery, the battle on 404 Not Found the stairs; the rout where the men […]

Laura Gascoigne January/February 2019 The buzz of anticipation in the COL Ballroom in Davenport Iowa is audible,

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nginx/1.21.1 the audience

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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?” “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

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world that speaks 6,900 languages,” cooed the catalogue, “the language of gold remains universal”. To prove it, the auction house promised to

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nginx/1.21.1 take collectors “on a journey through the great civilisations […]

Laura Gascoigne September/October 2019

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nginx/1.21.1 Among the many examples of

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the wit and wisdom 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, a contributor to Boris […]