‘A Naughty House’

Charles Nicholl: Shakespeare’s Landlord, 24 June 2010

... residents, and one of the first to appear at the new court was a local apothecary’s wife, Grace Watson, charged with ‘giving reviling speeches against Sir Baptist Hicks touching the building of the Sessions House’. A later writer describes it as ‘a shapeless brick lump containing a great warehouse in the centre for the court, and houses for the ...

A Country Emptied

Ian Jack: The Highland Clearances, 7 March 2019

The Scottish Clearances: A History of the Dispossessed 1600-1900 
by T.M. Devine.
Allen Lane, 464 pp., £25, October 2018, 978 0 241 30410 5
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... famous than the lyrics. Then in the 19th century an otherwise obscure genre painter called John Watson Nicol (1856-1926) gave the same name to his only famous picture. Exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1883, Nicol’s Lochaber No More depicts a miserable farewell to the Highlands. A man with a heavy plaid around his shoulders stands at a ship’s rail while ...

Open in a Scream

Colm Tóibín, 4 March 2021

Francis Bacon: Revelations 
by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan.
William Collins, 869 pp., £30, January, 978 0 00 729841 9
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... of the best sources for Bacon’s thinking in these years is the diary of his cousin Diana Watson, who saw him regularly in London. ‘At tea,’ she wrote, Bacon ‘said he could not get away from the Crucifixion idea – that he never really wanted to do anything else’. She referred to it as his ‘frightful Crucifixion complex’. His only ...