Buckingham Palace
The heyday of the gay guardsmen
In 1943 the music critic Desmond Shawe-Taylor placed an advertisement in Exchange & Mart offering a pair of trooper’s breeches…
Top gear
Normally, when you look at portraits you feel obliged to focus on the sitter. But quite often you’re thinking, ‘Ooh,…
Wings of desire
Maria Sibylla Merian was a game old bird of entrepreneurial bent, with an overwhelming obsession with insects. Born in Frankfurt…
Long life
I wrote last week about a swarm of bees that had attached itself to a wall of my house, as…
Palace Notebook
The day of my investiture at Buckingham Palace dawned bringing freezing rain and fierce winds, which lashed at the windows…
Here we go again: bankers taking liberties in pools full of sharks
It was at the Mansion House dinner last year that a City gent two seats away announced himself to be…
Brown studies
Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione (1609–64) was, I must admit, unknown to me until I visited this show, the only Castiglione I…
