by Valerie | Sep 20, 2018 | art, Fashion, General interest, history, Italy, museums, travel
One of the most powerful of many memorable sequences in the Visconti film of Il Gattopardo (The Leopard) is when the hero and heroine – Tancredi and Angelica (acted by Alain Delon and Claudia Cardinale) – run, frolicking, through the attic rooms of an immense and...
by Valerie | Jul 19, 2018 | art, General interest, history, Italy, people, travel
The very word – ghost – evokes fear and fascination. It conjures up, literally, a host of images from will o’ the wisps dancing in cemeteries to Anne Boleyn running along a corridor in Hampton Court clasping her head under her arm. A country house near us boasts of a...
by Valerie | Jun 19, 2018 | art, childhood, General interest, history, Italy, museums, people, travel
Some years ago I was having dinner in a handsome brick townhouse built in the early 1700s when a small soft piece of leather with a ribbon in a bow was passed around – a tiny child’s shoe. It had just been found under centuries-old plaster, recently removed to...
by Valerie | Apr 4, 2018 | art, General interest, history, Italy, museums, people, travel
I was asked to look at a painting and pronounce whether it is an authentic work by Zoffany, an 18th-century portrait painter. Is it really his autograph work? As I write his name, my memory conjures up visions of gentlemen and women, in formal or informal poses, in...
by Valerie | Mar 28, 2018 | art, General interest, history, people, poetry
When did ‘thou’, ‘thee, ‘thy’ and ‘thine’ die an unnatural death? They lingered on in regional dialects into the last century, but I suspect they dropped out of common usage well over a century ago in the more formal Victorian era. Intimate insult was used during the...
by Valerie | Mar 21, 2018 | art, childhood, General interest, history, people, Uncategorized
Daniel is eight years old. Sometimes when he wakes up early in the morning he goes into the garden to play his recorder, if it’s not too cold. If it is, he plays it softly in the kitchen. In March, he told me, he could be playing in the Albert Hall. ‘Who was Albert?’...
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