Saturday, 24 August 2019

Forced by a disobliging new world to shift on to the shoulders of an alien organization

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[Lord Sackville] did not see himself in the role of a willing benefactor of the National Trust to be accorded grateful thanks on a public s...
Friday, 23 August 2019

For others the problem is the weather - for us it is war

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He [Michael Rayment] went and looked at the ancient vineyards Gaston Hochar had revived in 1932 when he sent his son Serge to be trained in...
Thursday, 22 August 2019

If you are an Alsatian winemaker you change your nationality and lose your market every 25 years

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Halfway up the picturesque cobbled main street of Riquewihr are the shop, offices, and cellar of the family Hugel who have made and sold wi...
Wednesday, 21 August 2019

The English, he said, were so spoilt and awed and besotted with writing that they saw the plastic arts as secondary

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I once interviewed a very short-tempered Howard Hodgkin, and he erupted with a paean to the inability of the English to see, or make, good...
Tuesday, 20 August 2019

Why would you drink like a prissy prancing mellifluous child of Dionysus in the vineyards of antiquity

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We [the British] drink like this because we can, because it's our birthright, it's our heritage, our history, our myth and legend. ...
Monday, 19 August 2019

The worst was in the ruins of Warsaw, or the fields of Treblinka, or in the marshes of Belarus, or the pits of Babi Yar

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The American and British soldiers who liberated the dying inmates from camps in Germany believed that they had discovered the horrors of Na...
Saturday, 17 August 2019

This cannot be said of any other European country

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A rough estimate of two million total mortal losses on the territory of present-day Belarus during the Second World War seems reasonable an...