London
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“The English have for centuries been a mystery to the peoples of other countries, and failure to solve this mystery has led the stranger to use all sorts of epithets.” In June 1945 this sentence began the dictation passage in an exam paper for the Certificate in Proficiency in English. Around then my father, a…
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I’m dedicating this post and an image that I’ve named The Absurdity of Totalitarian Repression of Art and Thought at the Elephant Dentist to Irina and Anna, who are both dead. Frank Monaghan’s article on statues and symbolism, When pulling down statues isn’t pulling down history, is worth reading for a serious take. I’d also recommend Anne Applebaum’s…
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Apologies, firstly, to any artists reading this who know what I’m talking about more than I do. This August I saw two exhibitions, three days and five hundred years apart, that made me feel I have finally learned something quite profound about visual art. On Tuesday I went to see Breathing Colour at the Design…
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Peckham and godliness might not seem an obvious combination if what you’ve heard has mostly been about gangs, riot and murder. If you’ve travelled through here early on a Sunday you will know different. Katrin Maier quotes her own fieldnote, and it chimes with what I’ve seen: It is about nine am on a…
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If you’ve ever been south of the river in London you’ll probably have seen the Faraday Memorial, even if you didn’t realise it. The Memorial is the big steel cube in the middle of what used to be a traffic roundabout at Elephant and Castle. The area around it is now more pedestrian-friendly. It looks…
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