some LANDSCAPES

When I reached the point of sand jutting out among the waves, the spell of the place descended upon me with a positive shock. No mere “scene...

Last weekend we went to The Garden Cinema to see the new Wilhelmina-Barns Graham film A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things. There was an interv...

I've been on an Irish culture kick over the last month: first the film  Kneecap , then Juno and the Paycock with Mark Rylance and then A...

I enjoyed Martin Gayford's new book  Venice: City of Pictures . Reading it felt like returning to a well-loved painting and finding new,...

In 1809 Ivan Krylov (1769-1844) published his first collection of twenty-three verse fables - over time the book grew to include 197. Gordon...

Fyodor Tyutchev (1803-73) is included in The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry but his landscape poems are given rather faint praise: 'the ...

Years ago when I studied art history I was very taken with a particular passage in Heidegger's essay 'The Origin of the Work of Art...

Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens, The Vision of Saint Hubert , 1617-20 I have been reading Woodland Imagery in Northern Art c. 1...

Emma Stibbon, Cliff Crevice, Beachy Head , 2023 We went to Eastbourne at the weekend for the Emma Stibbon exhibition 'Melting Ice | Risi...

Fifteen years ago I started a blog post on Flaubert's Bouvard and Pecuchet by explaining that I had just joined Twitter. Encouraged by...

I was recently in Nuremberg and had been keen to see the Albrecht Dürer house, although I was a bit disappointed to be honest, hoping for so...

Back in 1991 I went to a fascinating exhibition at the Towner Art Gallery in Eastbourne (in its old building) called From Art to Archaeology...

Last month we were in the The Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg which contains some wonderful Northern Renaissance art and the world...

We just got back from Prague, where there is a lot of interesting landscape-related art I could talk about. When I last went there photograp...

I have written here often about the importance of a viewing point - one of the pleasures of any walk is finding a natural seat from which to...

  Determined now to rid ourselves of Netflix and save some money, we have started watching a few last films that we hadn't got round to ...

Page from The Classic of Mountains and Seas in the National Library of China The Chinese Classic of Mountains and Seas , the Shanhai jing ,...

  Still thinking about the landscape of Sicily (above) which we saw on our holiday at Easter, I have been re-reading the Idylls of Theocritu...

  It is nearly a decade since I featured Laura Cannell on this blog soon after she released her debut solo album Quick Sparrows Over the Bl...