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2 weeks ago | 
prospectmagazine.co.uk | Daron Acemoglu |Imaan Irfan |Rebecca Swirsky |Graeme Green
Deborah Levy: ‘At the close of a novel, the world must become bigger’
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Jan 17, 2025 | 
worldofinteriors.com | Rebecca Swirsky
Tarot is du jour. Less wacky than the outright occult and comforting in turbulent times, the appeal is understandable. Yet instead of emerging from a deeply mystical tradition (as is commonly believed), did you know that tarot began life as a secular 15th-century card game of the Milanese court?
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Dec 16, 2024 | 
worldofinteriors.com | Rebecca Swirsky
Thatching is intrinsic to childhood: visit woods, build a den, lay bracken over the structure – and voilà! You’re a thatcher! For most of us, the experience remains in childhood, bathed in nostalgia. Bucking the trend, English graduate Tom Allan realised that neither city-living nor office jobs were for him. Taking a life risk (something of which most of us are shy) he quit his career in publishing, returned to the Scottish Borders, where he’d grown up on a smallholding, and married.
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Nov 23, 2024 | 
worldofinteriors.com | Rebecca Swirsky
Children annually hunt for bright, foil-wrapped Easter eggs. All year round, Mark Lawson Bell – no less rapturously – searches for plate sherds, drawn to their varied patterns (in archaeological terms, ‘shard’ is glass, ‘sherd’ is pottery). Recognising gold where others see flotsam, pocketing that which most of us would toss, Bell has, for over a decade, thumbed soil from faded surfaces, claiming prizes from London to Cornwall, Sussex to Wales.
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Nov 5, 2024 | 
prospectmagazine.co.uk | Rebecca Swirsky
Is Guernica (1937) the most famous piece of political protest art ever made? Probably. Depicting the wailing, the dead, the gorged and dismembered, Picasso’s Cubist mural is so ingrained in our collective consciousness that, while it technically protests the specific bombing of a specific town by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, ittranscends the universal, standing against the corrosiveness of all war, all violence.
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Mar 18, 2024 | 
worldofinteriors.com | Rebecca Swirsky
Rarely do pandemics beget positivity. Happily for the Soane, an exhibition was born. Consider if you will a construction-site hoarding advertising its architecture. Consider those small figures (animal and human) – depicted, perhaps, holding a child, or dog-walking – their presence adding scale, interest, animation, yet resembling no-one in particular.
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Feb 7, 2024 | 
museumsassociation.org | Rebecca Swirsky
The International African American Museum (IAAM), which opened last June in Charleston, South Carolina, has been a long time coming – 23 years, in fact. The venue tells the stories of the African American experience across generations, including the historic trauma and triumph, as well as addressing racism today.
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Oct 10, 2023 | 
prospectmagazine.co.uk | Rebecca Swirsky
In 1877, Florence Nightingale penned a letter to her brother-in-law:“I know no class of murderers who have killed so many people as hospital architects. At this moment, there are many diseases less fatal in the most wretched homes than in hospital.”Nightingale, in fact, had a good relationship with architects, but she understood their vital role in the success, or failure, of what are perhaps the most complex buildings to create, operate and maintain.
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Aug 16, 2023 | 
spectator.com.au | Rebecca Swirsky
Open Up Faber, pp.208, 14.99 Thomas Morris has a knack of writing about ordinary things in an unsettling way and unsettling things in an ordinary way. He described his debut collection of ten stories set in Caerphilly, We Don’t Know What We’re Doing, as ‘realism with a kink’. Open Up, a slimmer second offering of five stories, amps up the Kafka. One is narrated by a seahorse, another by a vampire.
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Aug 15, 2023 | 
spectator.co.uk | Rebecca Swirsky
Text size Small Medium Large Line Spacing Compact Normal Spacious Comments Thomas Morris has a knack of writing about ordinary things in an unsettling way and unsettling things in an ordinary way. He described his debut collection of ten stories set in Caerphilly, We Don’t Know What We’re Doing, as ‘realism with a kink’. Open Up, a slimmer second offering of five stories, amps up the Kafka. One is narrated by a seahorse, another by a vampire. Morris’s attitude towards his characters remains...
