Last updated on January 7th, 2019It was a full house on Friday night at the opening of the Oxford Lieder Festival, the UK’s largest art song festival. And to mark a nation gone bonkers with Brexit, the organisers chose an apt theme: The Grand Tour, A European Journey in Song. Talk about sticking a chorus…
The Last Tsar: Blood and Revolution – Science Museum
Last updated on April 12th, 2019A new exhibition at the Science Museum in London originated a few years ago, when a curator discovered a crate buried in the museum’s vast archive. Inside, she found 22 photograph albums of the Russian Imperial family, taken between 1908 and 1916, and so began the journey of The Last Tsar:…
START Art Fair at the Saatchi Gallery
Last updated on January 7th, 2019It’s time to rev those arty engines and get over to the START Art Fair at the Saatchi Gallery. Now in its fifth year, the annual art market is promoting 50 artists from over 25 countries, providing a unique platform for emerging young artists and galleries. Launched in 2014, START…
Wallace Collection – A National Treasure
Last updated on February 18th, 2021Tucked behind the Selfridges department store in Marylebone is the Wallace Collection, one of my favourite London haunts. It’s an eighteenth-century city pile with a jaw-dropping art collection and a 500-strong furniture depository which would make Marie Antoinette feel perfectly at home. It’s a sea of crimson red, rococo gold,…
Prince and Patron at Buckingham Palace
Last updated on March 9th, 2019It’s hard to pick a favourite at Prince and Patron, Buckingham Palace, an exhibition marking the 70th birthday of His Royal Highness, the Prince of Wales. The 100 works which have been stuffed into the Palace’s Ball Supper Room were personally chosen by the Prince from the Royal Collection, the…
Serenade for a Steinway | A tour of the Steinway Pianos Factory in Hamburg
Last updated on June 4th, 2021My visit to Steinway pianos factory in Hamburg was a trip down black and white nostalgia lane. The first piece I ever penned for my creative writing degree was a portrait of my piano teacher, Sharko Hilbert. I chose her as my subject matter because I was still rooted in…
A Tour of Strawberry Hill House in Twickenham
Last updated on May 15th, 2022Strawberry Hill House in London’s leafy suburb of Twickenham is possibly the most unusual house in London. If Oscar Wilde and Nicky Haslam had sired a love child in the eighteenth century, I think it would have been its architect, a Horatio “Horace” Walpole. He had wit, he had style,…
Splendours of the Subcontinent – Queen’s Gallery
Last updated on October 22nd, 2020When I went to India, I came back with a couple of silk rugs and my most treasured collection of Ganesha statues. Shame I didn’t know any Maharajas, as I might have returned with some souvenirs the likes of which you have never seen. That is, until now. In a…
Behind the Scenes of the new Royal Academy
Last updated on January 19th, 2019 The Royal Wedding isn’t the only big event in London on Saturday 19 May. The Royal Academy opens its newly buffed doors to a new two-acre campus with 70% more public spaces and a bridge linking Burlington House on Piccadilly to 6 Burlington Gardens in Mayfair. And to mark…
Caroline or Change | Hampstead Theatre
Last updated on April 22nd, 2018Last night was one of firsts. The Hampstead Theatre gave me a singing washing machine, a purring dryer, a trio of serenading radios and yes, a harmonising bus. And as I’m not much of a soap-opera fan, I had never heard of Sharon D. Clarke, so this was my first…