MY LATEST BOOK invites you to join me on a fascinating 4000-mile, 88 day journey through parts of India including Karnataka, Rajasthan, West Bengal, Telengana, Tamil Nadu, and Pondicherry. My travelogue relates aspects of each place’s past and present; describes interesting encounters with diverse people – from autorickshaw drivers to artists and academics; and savours local foods. Immerse yourself in the pages of my illustrated account of a modern day Indian odyssey, and discover India without leaving home!
My book, “88 DAYS IN INDIA: A JOURNEY OF MEMORY AND DISCOVER” is available from Amazon websites, such as:
TODAY is the 15th of August, the anniversary of India becoming independent of British rule. What better day to announce the ‘launch’ of my latest book?
My new book invites you to join me on a fascinating 4000-mile, 88-day journey through parts of India including Karnataka, Rajasthan, West Bengal, Telangana, Tamil Nadu, and Pondicherry. My travelogue relates aspects of each place’s past and present; describes interesting encounters with diverse people – from autorickshaw drivers to artists and academics; and savours local foods. Immerse yourself in the pages of my illustrated account of a modern-day Indian odyssey, and discover the wonders of India without leaving home!
My book, “88 DAYS IN INDIA: A JOURNEY OF MEMORY AND DISCOVERY” is available from Amazon websites, such as:
THE CURRENT EXHIBITION at Japan House in London’s Kensington is on until 9 November 2025. It is a display of pictograms past and present. A pictogram is a graphical symbol, which conveys meaning by resembling a physical object.
The exhibition not only details the history of pictograms but also displays a large number of these symbols from Japan and elsewhere.
As is usual for exhibitions at Japan House, the show is well laid out and informative. However, it did little to arouse my interest in the subject of pictograms.
DURING MY CHILDHOOD in the 1960s, there was a concrete platform on Hampstead Heath Extension. It was close to Hampstead Way. Today, where it used to be visible, there is a mound of impenetrable bushes and weeds surrounded by a fence. The concrete structure was a base for anti-aircraft guns during WW2. Although, many German aircraft were knocked out of the sky by guns such as these, many of them caused a great deal of damage all over London. Recently, while sorting through some books, I came across a slender volume called “Hampstead At War”. It was first published by Hampstead Borough Council in 1946, republished by the Camden Historical Society in 1979, and then again in 1995. The book contains many photographs of the terrible destruction caused by bombs dropped by the Luftwaffe over Hampstead.
One of the photographs in the book struck a particular chord with me. It shows the badly damaged Hare and Hounds pub after it had been bombed in 1940. The pub, which was almost next door to the famous Old Bull & Bush pub, was established in about 1751. However, the building that was destroyed was built a long time after that.
Between 1965 and 1970, I used to travel From Golders Green station to Highgate School on the bus (route 210). Every school day, the bus would pass the Old Bull & Bush and its neighbour, the Hare and Hounds. When passing the latter in those days, I always wondered why the pub looked so recently built. When leafing through the “Hampstead at War” book today, more than 50 years after leaving the school, I found the answer. The book contains a photograph showing the extensively damaged pub.
The Hare and Hounds was rebuilt during the years I studied at Highgate. Although I can only faintly recall its appearance and can find only one photograph of it after its rebuilding, its presence remains firmly fixed in my memory. Finding the book certainly jogged my memory, and seeing the photographs of war damaged Hampstead makes a great impression. One wonders why the Germans chose to waste their ammunition on an area that has always been mainly residential.
NOT FAR FROM Henley-on-Thames, lies the village of Bix. Its name might derive from either the Anglo-Saxon word for box, an evergreen shrub, or from a word, ‘behaeson’ meaning ‘to vow’. By 1085, when the Domesday Book was compiled, Bix was divided into two nearby settlements, each of which had its own church. One of these has disappeared, and the other, St James, is now in ruins.
Still consecrated but in a dilapidated state, St James is now known as Bix Old Church. Very little is known about the early history of this ruined church. It was in existence by 1274, when it and the other church were so poor that they had to share a vicar. In the late 1700s, the walls of St James began to collapse. So, brick buttresses were constructed to prevent further damage. These buttresses are still standing, but they failed to halt the collapse of the church. In 1874, the church was deemed unusable, and a new church, the present St James, was built.
We visited the new church, arriving just in time to meet someone who was about to unlock it. Constructed in 1874, it is a Victorian gothic edifice. Inside, the church is built with bricks of differing colours arranged in layers to produce an eye-catching appearance. What makes this church fascinating is that it contains various things that were rescued from Bix Old Church: the font; two fragments of Flemish stained glass dating from 1530; and the carved stone bowl of the piscina. These valuable remains were moved from the old church to the newer one in 1875.
Bix Old Church is reached by a long country lane that is only wide enough for one car. It and the church are in surprisingly a rural environment, considering how close it is to places like Henley, Reading and High Wycombe. We visited the church mainly because when I passed a sign for Bix, which I thought was a strange name, I looked it up on the Internet later while enjoying a picnic, and found out about the existence of the ruined church. Once again, a short visit into the English countryside has resulted in an unexpected, fascinating discovery.
VISITORS TO LONDON (and residents of the city) should not miss visiting Kenwood House, which is in north London between Hampstead and Highgate. Not only does it contain a magnificent collection of Old Master paintings that can be compared favourably with what can be seen in Britain’s finest public art galleries, but it also has a beautiful library.
In my book about Hampstead, “Beneath a Wide Sky: Hampstead and its Environs”, I wrote:
“The first house to stand on the site of the present one was built in brick by John Bill (1576-1630), printer to King James I. He bought the Kenwood Estate (which was known as ‘Caen Wood’) in 1616. After several changes in ownership, the Estate was bought in about 1747 by a former Prime Minister and King George III’s close associate, John Stuart, third Earl of Bute (1713-1792). In 1754, Bute sold the property to the lawyer and law-reformer William Murray (1705-1793), who became the First Earl of Mansfield, and was Lord Chief Justice of the King’s Bench from 1756 to 1788. In 1778, he was a supporter of the Roman Catholic Relief Bill that led to the violent protests described above. During the First Earl’s stay in the House, he employed the architect Robert Adam (1728-1792) to make improvements.”
The library was one of the improvements that Robert Adam created at Kenwood. The library or Great Room was constructed between 1764 and 1774. It was intended both as a reception room and a library, which might explain why so little of this large room’s wall space is occupied by bookshelves. Most of the wall space is occupied by mirrors and windows. Lord Mansfield would have been used to host guests, hold dinners, and for music performances.
The library’s architecture is based on that of Roman public bath houses. John Summerson (1904-1992), the architectural historian, wrote of its design in his “The Iveagh Bequest, Kenwood : a short account of its history and architecture” (published 1988):
“This is one of the finest Adam rooms in existence … The shape of the room, with its curved ceiling leading into two apsidal ends, on the chords of which are pairs of columns, is one which Adam used for several of his most stately interiors. Apart from the plan, a great innovation for England was the flat arched ceiling which Adam frankly describes as ‘extremely beautiful …”
Although the library is the finest of Adam’s creations at Kenwood, there are others that deserve to be admired. These include the orangery, the entrance hall with its magnificent stucco ceiling, and the library’s anteroom. In this piece I have concentrated on the interior of Kenwood House, but a visit to this wonderful place should be accompanied by a stroll in the place’s superb, landscaped gardens.
WHEN A FRIEND invited us to join him at London’s Kenwood House to view an exhibition of portraits by the artist John Singer Sargent (1856-1925), I had some misgivings. In the not-too-distant past I saw an exhibition of his portraits at the Tate Britain, and I left it unimpressed. In that show, the portraits were displayed alongside the dresses that the sitters had worn for their pictures. In contrast, the show, which is on at Kenwood until 5 October 2025, was very satisfying.
Between 1870 and 1914, 102 American women married men in the British peerage, and more than this married into the British upper class. Put bluntly, the men were enriched by their American brides’ money, and the ladies acquired social positions that were highly regarded in British society. Regarding these marriages, Theodore Rooseveldt said:
“I thoroughly dislike … these international marriages … which are not even matches of esteem and liking, but which are based upon the sale of the girl for her money and the purchase of the man for his title.”
Sargent, the artist, made portraits of more than thirty of these brides, and it is a selection of these that are on display at Kenwood in an exhibition appropriately named “Heiress. Sargent’s American Portraits”. Each picture is accompanied by an information panel that gives interesting biographical details about the ladies.
Undoubtedly, Sargent’s grand portraits made with oil paints on canvas are superb. However, even better than these, and there are several on display at Kenwood, are his charcoal sketches. Unlike the paintings that required the subject to attend 6 or more sittings, the charcoal portraits were completed in one sitting. Despite or maybe because of the rapidity of completing the charcoal images, these portraits seem to be even more expressive than the oil paintings upon which he had spent far more time. During a period of 20 years, he completed almost 700 charcoal portraits. Although there might have been one or two of his charcoal portraits at the Tate exhibition, a great proportion of the exhibits at Kenwood were examples of Sargent’s superb charcoal technique. For me, the highlights of this small exhibition were the works executed in charcoal.
I left the show at Kenwood feeling pleased that I had been, and with a greater appreciation of Sargent’s talent than I had before.
THE ARTIST ANSELM Kiefer is said to have remarked:
“I think there is no innocent landscape, that doesn’t exist.”
By Nomoru Minata
For what we see when we regard a landscape is the result of millions of years of geological and meteorological evolution as well many millennia of interventions by biological phenomena including human activities: both constructive and destructive. As the writer and academic Robert Macfarlane wrote:
“We live on a restless crust of earth. Behind the façade of stability, everything is shifting, imperceptibly, but continuously.”
Artists have been creating images of landscape for many centuries. The earliest known depictions of landscape include Minoan frescoes created in about 1500 BC. The genre of European art called ‘landscape painting’ began in Holland in the seventeenth century. The website of the White Cube Gallery in Bermondsey noted in connection with this:
“17th-century Dutch artists of the Golden Age, during which the genre ‘landschap’ was first named, turned away from religious subjects as an expression of Protestant values …”
Until 7 September 2025, the White Cube at Bermondsey is hosting an exhibition called “Alien Shores”. Curated by Susanna Greeves, this show:
“… explores landscape as a place of memory, imagination, yearning and belonging. Through painting, video, photography and sculpture, the artists included offer speculative, symbolic or surreal depictions of emotional terrain and voyages of the imagination, visions of the distant past or possible futures.”
The exhibition includes works by 37 artists, all of whom worked in the twentieth and/or twenty-first centuries. It is a display of modern and contemporary works of art that either depict landscapes or try to evoke thoughts of landscapes. The works are distributed amongst three rooms. In the first two rooms there are videos and kinetic sculptures as well as paintings. A video by Noémie Goudal is particularly fascinating and dramatic. The third and largest room contains a mixed bag of paintings and a sculpture by Noguchi. My enjoyment of the paintings in this room was not 100%. Some of the paintings looked like wall space fillers rather than great works of art. However, it his is not a room to be missed because it contains three outstanding landscapes by Anselm Kiefer. Seeing these in the company of many of the others served to emphasize (to me) what a great contemporary artist he is. Other ‘stars’ in this room were paintings by Minoru Nomata, Georgia O’Keeffe and Marina Rheingantz. A three-dimensional screen depicting a leafless forest by Eva Jospin in the long corridor of the White Cube also impressed me.
Although I wondered why a few of the artworks were included in the show, the Alien Shores exhibition has much to recommend it. It was fascinating to see how in a time frame of well under 100 years, artists have been tackling their various portrayals of landscape, and the interesting varieties of ways they have done it.
yamey 