Ian Britain

‘Spellbinding’ is an apt word to sum up the effects created by Russian-born German artist Walter Spies in his phantasmagoric, darkly glowing landscapes and figure paintings, particularly those that he fashioned when living in Java and Bali between 1923 and 1941. Tropical luxuriance has other superlative renderers in art – Gauguin, ‘Le Douanier’ Rousseau, Donald Friend – but none of the ... (read more)

In a review on quite another subject for ABR’s recent summer issue (‘Barry by Edna’, December 2010–January 2011), I had occasion to invoke the career of Michael Holroyd, ‘reigning, if ailing, king of English biographers’, as I dubbed him. On the basis of his well-publicised illness, I sadly but confidently declared that Holroyd’s joint biographical study of the Irving and Terry theat ... (read more)

On those twin Titans of the twentieth-century English stage, John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson, fellow-actor Simon Callow recently reflected: ‘We tell stories about them … because they filtered life through the medium of their souls to create new and rich variations on the human condition: they lived their art to the fullest extent possible. Of whom shall we be telling stories now?’ There i ... (read more)