Blog - People In Mind
Saints and Miracles
I wrote this nearly a month ago. Then the screen on my computer slipped, dropping all controls out of sight. It could not be repaired. Nothing is lost – all stashed away in the Cloud - but I was without the internet until now. This is written on an old stand-by...
Pilgrimage – in search of Mozart
Friends have invited me back to Vienna and I am tempted. Will I repeat the strange things I did when I was last there? I planned to see the famous Spanish horses, but it was the wrong time of year for the dressage displays, so I could only look down from a balcony at...
Pilgrimage – from the Blessed Virgin to Padre Pio
One Easter in Italy we were preparing supper we heard chanting. I turned off the flame under the pasta water; we pulled on jackets and followed the sounds and lights moving across the valley. The sun had not set and we could just make out a group of people holding...
Pilgrimage – San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice
Everyone who has been to Venice has looked out from the Piazzetta, the Doge’s Palace on the left and Sansovino’s magnificent library on the right, over the bevy of gondolas across the lagoon to Palladio’s San Giorgio Maggiore. It is marooned on an island – seemingly...
In Search of Mary Arden
The only time I’ve seen Michael Wood was when he came to give a lecture in Hull University’s Middleton Hall and the projector could only project stamp sized images on to the massive screen in front of an eager audience. He was, understandably, furious, stamping his...
The Truth of Imagination
Not long ago I was leaning against a wall warmed by the sun and reading a dog-eared copy of Keats’ poems. I have visited the house in Rome where he died – the Keats-Shelley Museum – many times, and each is profoundly moving in a different way. That is why I return...
Santa Maria del Priorato, Rome
Our long affair with Giambattista Piranesi began when I gave John a book with etchings of Rome. I wasn’t at all sure whether I should have done this. The collection had been given to me by a former boyfriend, but it was to change his life – and mine. Many hours were...
Idiosyncratic Italian Bureaucracy
Every spring I traipse into a thirteenth century castellated building and follow the signs to ‘Tributi’. For many years I climbed up worn stone steps to the second floor, but now they have fitted a slim lift into the stairwell following decades of complaints...
Locked In or Locked Out?
For some time I have been excluded from my own emails, treated as an intruder on my own life, or as a negative alien. Hence my blog silence. This happens the moment I take my notebook away from its home base in Beverley. It starts playing up like a recalcitrant child....
Idiosyncratic Italian Bureaucracy
Every spring I traipse into a thirteenth century castellated building and follow the signs to ‘Tributi’. For many years I climbed up worn stone steps to the second floor, but now they have fitted a slim lift into the stairwell following decades of complaints from the...
A Pope and Two Cardinals – creating characters at a glance!
Of all portraits of popes that fascinate me, one stands out above all others. Shudder at the sheer power and frustration of Titian’s gnarled Farnese Paul Iii , and the fear of the cardinals around him, now in the museum in Naples. He was the pope...
An Invitation that can’t be sent, thanks to India’s Prime Minister Modi
A week ago I read about the documentary India’s Daughter and decided I would email my Indian friend in Delhi so we could both watch it today, International Women’s Day, and discuss it. But on the 10 o’clock news last Wednesday, I saw that Prime Minister Modi had...
An Amazing Patron
I am writing this while contemplating the evening sunlight on the Minster. This winter there have been many sunny weekends, but paths are muddy and National Trust or English Heritage sites and country houses are closed for spring cleaning. What a blessing it is to...
A Female President?
For some years I used to go twice a year on lecture tours of the USA. It was a very pleasant way of seeing friends from the summer courses I had led in Cambridge and in Tuscany for UCLA and Berkeley. It was also a chance to travel all over the country and meet many...
Work in progress – what has happened is changing the book
I’ve just finished the second revision of chapter 1. Rewriting has started. I’ve decided to seed references to current events and see how they grow. My current reading helps me to stand back and reconsider. Having not read a book by Colm Toibin for some time, I...
Epiphanies
Days are getting longer, very slowly. I’m told it begins on my birthday, 29 December. The sun is setting every day nearer to five. When it sets at five I begin to feel the first intimations of spring. I note there are a few tiny yellow crocuses peeping up through the...
Teddy Bear Blasphemy
Days before the Paris tragedy, for some reason I was thinking about the teddy bear incident in Sudan some years ago. It must have been because Daniel, aged 5, was looking for a name to give to ‘Lisa’s child’. Lisa is his favourite cuddly toy, a lamb who has rapidly...
Jack Frost
At the Christmas Tree Festival in Beverley Minster I instinctively searched for the tree that was glittering white, not for snow, but to be reminded of the glorious patterns Jack Frost painted on window panes in my childhood. I somehow miss them. They looked like...
On Meeting a Spy
When we first met, I had no idea that this man in oatmeal tweeds and with sparse fair grey hair was a spy. He owned a semi-ruined property near Cortona in Tuscany. Someone had tipped us off that he had an uninhabited farmhouse to sell off the road leading through the...
Intolerance or Weakness?
It happens that we’ve been away just when films we had been planning to see came to local cinemas, and went. This week we caught two of them: The Imitation Game and Mr Turner. I thought I knew about the cracking of the Enigma Code by Alan Turing, that he was a genius,...
Recent Comments