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Good lecture tonight on The Nazarenes, 19C German Romantics who formed the Brotherhood of Saint Luke and tried to recreate a medieval artist's workshop in Rome. Johann Friedrich Overbeck's portrait of Franz Pforr (1810) references Dürer and Fra Angelico. The cat symbolises the devil tamed. (1/5)

submitted 6 hours ago • 1 comment

Birmingham: fending off developers one building at a time. Not a cinema any more, sadly. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

submitted 11 hours ago • 0 comments

Reading the news today and thinking about the two South African matrons in the care home who looked after my mum with such compassion and attention. Only fitting. She in her time had been an immigrant working in the NHS. There’s no policy stupid or cruel enough to appease the right.

submitted 12 hours ago • 1 comment

Outstanding Titus at the RSC. Great use of movement and sound, the right balance between horror and comedy. Top performances all round and nobody fainted, though the front row wore splatter ponchos for Act V #Pie

submitted 2 days ago • 0 comments

Owing to a shorter than usual train, some passengers will have to stand.

submitted 2 days ago • 0 comments

Favourite grave in St Philip’s churchyard. John and Euphrosina Belliss of Edgbaston. She outlived him by almost forty years, which is sad.

submitted 2 days ago • 1 comment

May's read in the Agatha Christie challenge is Cards on the Table, and I remain impressed by her economy of characterisation: 'Every healthy Englishman who saw him longed earnestly and fervently to kick him! They said, with a singular lack of originality, "There's that damned Shaitana!"'

submitted 3 days ago • 0 comments

Well, the choice of 'Leo' has not diminished my suspicions.

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

I’ve now had more popes than cats. Unless the new guy turns out to be several cats in a cassock…

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

While we're all waiting, I find myself wondering what the Palmarians are up to. It's so hard keeping up with Antipopes. They're the ones who thought Pope Paul VI was being kept drugged and held hostage by masonic infiltrators. They also excommunicated Pope John Paul II as a Marxist spy.

submitted 4 days ago • 1 comment

Fabulous etchings from the Rembrandt House in Amsterdam at BMAG today. The windmill in the poster was known as Little Stinkmill and smelled of the cod liver oil used to soften leather there. (1/5)

submitted 5 days ago • 1 comment

Strong contender for most ruined view in Birmingham, against some stiff competition: ‘I mean, yes, it’ll look like a giant agricultural shed, but we’ll put some pointy bits in to contextualise it seamlessly with its Victorian surroundings.’ ‘Cool. We’re just building a big fuck off glass box.’

submitted 5 days ago • 0 comments

Should probably have photographed this before I ate half of it, but I’m in awe at how nice my chocolate orange cake is. I cheated and used a cake mix and, while I’m not sponsored by Wright’s Cake Mixes, I’m perfectly willing to be.

submitted 6 days ago • 0 comments

More from the Lyell Lectures, this time on the Kitchen Library. These were essentially religious tracts dressed up as plotless novels designed to socialise servants to their position. They were bought or presented by employers, Sunday Schools etc. but there's little evidence of them being read.

submitted 6 days ago • 1 comment

Paintings featuring someone (almost) tumbling into a ravine: Caspar David Friedrich's Chalk Cliffs on Rügen. A self portrait painted on his honeymoon, 38 years before Freud's birth, so no Freudian interpretations of this image of a man stumbling before he can enter a gorge, please.

submitted 7 days ago • 1 comment

New dragon just dropped.

submitted 8 days ago • 1 comment

If you see this, post your getaway vehicle. youtu.be/c3DcChXNyYQ?...

submitted 9 days ago • 0 comments

How many plays feature someone tumbling into a ravine? There seems to have been a fashion for it in 1867 with Watts Phillips's Nobody's Child, ripped off by Dickens in No Thoroughfare, and then nothing. I shall now list all the plays where people should fall into a ravine. (1/299)

submitted 10 days ago • 1 comment

It’s Lá Bealtaine, so bring in the May with some wild stuff from the garden and tie flowers to your cows’ tails so the fairies don’t steal your butter.

submitted 11 days ago • 0 comments

Ridiculous for it to be warm enough to still be sitting in the garden reading, at half eight in the evening, in April. In a normal English spring it would be raining horses or we'd have mislaid the Moon and all the seas would have become ominously still.

submitted 12 days ago • 0 comments

Brain: It's a beautiful day, potter round outside doing some gentle weeding. Lungs: Nope, absolutely not. Three weeds is your limit and now I'm going to stop sending oxygen to your brain. Brain: Hey. Left foot: CRAMP, CRAMP NOW AND FOREVER. What? No, it's unrelated, I'm just joining in.

submitted 12 days ago • 1 comment

First of this year's Lyell Lectures from the Bodleian on Victorian Books and their Servants. Handbooks for servants devoted space to the correct care of books as objects. Jenny, seen here taking an interest in books as books, comes a cropper when she inevitably upsets an inkwell. (1/3)

submitted 13 days ago • 1 comment

You join me on day three of my asthma attack. I’d like to thank tree pollen everywhere for helping me achieve this. Looking forward to my trip to our new Midlands Metropolitan University Hospital, which appears on road signs as MMUH, as though it’s kissing you better.

submitted 13 days ago • 1 comment

Reading around Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, I learn 100 shillings would buy you a mounted archer or for £10 you could have a lightly armed horseman. If you’d rather fight your own battle, the best armour came from Milan and cost £10-12.

submitted 15 days ago • 1 comment

Dynamic, funny Marriage of Figaro tonight from the #MetOpera. Beautifully staged and with a 1930s setting which gives it a slight air of 'Poirot the Opera'.

submitted 16 days ago • 1 comment