Inigo Thomas is finishing his book about the art dealer Tomás Harris.
The image on the seal is of the House of Commons in the mid-17th century, when the chamber was inside the old Palace of Westminster. It began to appear on seals, medallions and medals after Charles I had lost the war and Parliament was supreme. Once Charles was dead, moulds for his seals were smashed by a blacksmith in the Commons itself. The royal coinage was replaced by the...
Patrick Eagar made his career taking photographs of cricketers, though when he started out in London more than fifty years ago his subjects were mainly party people. In 1966, he took a picture with his Leica of someone he’d never heard of: Oskar Schindler. ‘It is not an exciting shot,’ he once said. ‘But it exists. It is just about the only photograph I have seen...
The registrar at Chelsea Town Hall on the King’s Road said that anything I told him would be assumed to be true: a notice on the desk next to his computer monitor explained the dangers of perjuring yourself. Then we began to go through the details of the death certificate. Name: Hugh Swynnerton Thomas. Date of death: 7 May 2017. Your relation to him? Son.
A few years ago, when I...
In 1893, the London Daily News published an article about Notting Dale, an area in north Kensington also known as the Potteries for its brick-making kilns and clay pits. ‘A West End Avernus’ was the headline: poor, overcrowded, with shocking housing – if there was an entrance to the Underworld, then this, the article said, was it. A grotesque report inspired by the piece a couple of years later blamed the bad condition of the area on the ‘vicious proclivities of the people themselves’. They were, the report said, ‘loafers, cab-runners, beggars, tramps, thieves and prostitutes’. One of the clay pits made by the 19th-century brick makers was so large that it was called the ‘Ocean’: it was filled with slime. The houses nearby were said to be of ‘a wretched class, many being mere hovels in a ruinous condition, filthy in the extreme, and containing vast accumulations of garbage and offal’. The wells were contaminated. The risk of cholera was high.
An enormous queue of well-dressed men and women formed at Tate Britain on the opening night of the Hockney exhibition in early February. It inched forward, a few more guests at a time; at the back people craned their heads trying to work out the reason for the bottleneck – or gave up and went to get a drink in one of the galleries off the octagonal hall at the centre of the building....
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