by Valerie | Jul 17, 2019 | art, General interest, history, people, travel
Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, the indefatigable German immigrant in the 1930s who was passionate about English vernacular architecture, founded the indispensable Penguin guides to the buildings of England’s towns and villages. It may be legend or fantasy that he wished to...
by Valerie | Jul 3, 2019 | art, Fashion, General interest, history, people, poetry, travel
As a child, the Nottinghamshire novelist D.H. Lawrence used to watch his father walking slowly back home up the dew-strewn pastures between his mining village and the pits after a night shift and later wrote, ‘that is the landscape of my heart’. Those words came to...
by Valerie | Jun 19, 2019 | 1950s, art, childhood, Fifties, General interest, history, people, travel, Uncategorized
Most days I allow myself a few minutes of fantasy exploring a zone chosen at random on the large globe on one side of my desk. I pause to wonder at the amount of land in the northern hemisphere and the wide expanse of sea in the southern one – a seemingly chance...
by Valerie | Jun 12, 2019 | 1950s, art, book reviews, childhood, Fifties, General interest, history, Italy, people, poetry, reading groups, travel, writing a novel
Soon tennis will start at Wimbledon, rain permitting! The world-famous championships are about to begin in the prosperous, leafy suburb of London. It’s the season of long, languid summer evenings around the midsummer day on the 21 June, the longest day in the northern...
by Valerie | Jun 5, 2019 | General interest, history, people, travel
This is the start of a poem by my grandson which he waved in the air outside Buckingham Palace when Trump arrived there last Monday. Ten next month, he has started his political as well as poetical journey early! I was three times his age when I marched along...
by Valerie | May 22, 2019 | General interest, travel
In a few days’ time, I shall be diving back into the mind of a seventeen-year-old face to face with an artist in a small ancient town that crouches on a hill less than an hour away from Madrid. In the 12th and 13th centuries, it sheltered dissidents and scholars. It...
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