During the spring and summer of 2016, the Turner Contemporary gallery in Margate on England’s North Sea coast hosted a new work by Yinka Shonibare MBE. Born in London but raised in Nigeria, the artist now uses the royal honour – which lends a ritual afterlife to a defunct imperial system – as part of his professional title. Pride, or parody?
This morning, a stiff breeze was blowing from the Persian Gulf. It often does, with a welcome cooling effect. Outside the restaurant windows, though, half a dozen human figures swung perilously in the gale as they inched down the building. External window-cleaning at 150 metres can never count as a relaxing job.
During my sixth-form years, I studied Ancient Greek for the first and last time. It played no part in my A-level curriculum.
Whenever the BBC needs a familiar standby to fill a gap in its early-evening schedules, it turns to ‘Dad’s Army’. As a result, David Croft and Jimmy Perry’s much-loved Second World War sitcom has over the decades tickled audiences a lot younger than those who saw the nine series on their first outings between 1968 and 1977.
Only on my third visit to the Alhambra did I really begin to understand the writing on the wall. The palace-fortress of the Nasrid rulers of Granada can be read – if you know Arabic – just like a book.
Alona Frankel is talking about ‘the most horrible event of my life’. A much-loved Israeli children’s writer, with a late-blooming career as an autobiographer, she survived the Lvov ghetto in Poland. One of a handful of Jews who escaped transportation to the death camps, Frankel came as a child to the new state in 1949. She sits, genial and youthful, in the conference hall at Mishkenot Sha’ananim just outside the old city of Jerusalem.