Notes from the North

It’s the last Saturday in June. There is a warm wind blowing strongly through Edinburgh. Tourists and locals are sprawled out on the dry grass in Princes Street Gardens and I am with them. I am waiting to go to the opening of the exhibition celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Talbot Rice Gallery.  one of the Shawky glass marionettes Across the grass I can hear the voice of a woman speaking to a crowd which has gathered in the square outside the National Gallery. She and they are protesting the occupation, starvation and killings in Palestine. I have been out on other Saturdays lately and seen similar actions: outside St Giles Cathedral (a collection and a choir singing), outside Barclays bank (‘blood bank’ and other slogans chalked in big capitals on the pavement). I wonder how these signs of dissent and anger will be handled if the government persists in its decision to designate Palestine Action a terrorist organisation. For the moment their documentary To Kill a War Mac...

  Every church in Edinburgh has a story to tell. I have already written about St Mary’s Cathedral on Palmerston Place, Old Saint Paul’s Episcopal church on Jeffrey Street and Saint Giles on the Royal Mile but until last month I had never looked inside Saint Patrick’s Church on the Cowgate although I pass it every time I walk back home across the park.     It stands about halfway down the High Street, an imposing façade complete with a triumphal arch and steeple. Built initially as an Episcopalian chapel, it was sold in the early 19 th  century to the Presbyterian Relief Church which was founded during what is known as the Second Secession (from the Church of Scotland). The history of the various Secessions in Presbyterian Scotland – and there were lots - is a complicated topic but in the case of the Presbyterian Relief Church it was triggered by a recurring dispute about patronage and who had the power to appoint ministers. The dissenters stood for the rights of loca...

April marks the start of the bowling season. From my kitchen window l can watch the man with the mower pushing backwards and forwards across the turf almost every day, leaving perfectly straight green lines behind him. His efforts result in a lawn so smooth and firm that you could as easily play marbles on it. It’s the bowling green equivalent of a number 2 haircut at the barber’s.   In the Meadows, all along Princes Street, in the Botanics, in other public parks and countless private gardens there is an explosion of cherry blossom, showers of pink petals floating to the ground at the slightest breath of wind. I stop on my way back from town, first to listen to and then record the song of a thrush, a rarity these days, out of sight in one of the trees near the Parliament. Then one morning I find lots of tiny feathers scattered across the grass in my little back garden. It looks like the local sparrow-hawk has made off with an unlucky bluetit. And when a day later I’m on a bus throu...

‘The imagination is the primary and first site of resistance. The market abhors all values that are not the values of the market. Children’s books, to a great extent, because they are written for those who cannot participate in the market, can offer resistance to a vision of the good life which is built on a hegemony of acquisition. Children’s books insist in having faith in vast truths that lie beyond consumption and display. Their utopianism is that of the Moomins and Pippi Longstocking: it offers an experiential microcosm of a more ideal world. ( Kathleen Rundell, London Review of Books February 2025 ) It was reading Rundell’s thoughts on the importance of books for children of all ages, that led me to visit Scotland’s Storytelling Centre on the ground floor of John Knox’s house on the High Street. The Centre is free to visit (you pay £7 to visit the museum in the rest of the house which is where John Knox lived in the last years of his life). It is open from 10 am – 6 pm seven day...

The non-Catholic cemetery in Rome is a good place to spend some quiet time in. By mid-February the camellias are in flower and the box hedges make a sturdy fretwork of green through the grey crosses and tombstones. Keats has his grave here, as do Shelley and Gramsci, and many others less well-known.   Backing onto one end of the cemetery is the huge centuries-old pyramid tomb the praetor (magistrate), Caius Cestius commissioned to hold his bones.  It is still so perfect you might think it’s a monstrous testament to a 19 th  century rich man’s arrogance rather than the mausoleum of a Roman citizen who lived some time around 12 BC. But that’s Rome all over - the ruins and vestiges of ancient imperial grandeur and self-delusion still cluttering large parts of the city, rendering even the most superficial digging up of the roads and parks a delicate - and costly - business.    The Centrale Montemartini is in the Ostiense quarter of the city a little further south fr...

embroideries (detail) Guadalupe Maravilla David Talbot Rice (1903-1972) has an Edinburgh art gallery named after him. He was an expert in Byzantine art, appointed to the Gordon Watson chair of Fine Art at Edinburgh University at a young age. Like Giles Henry Robertson, his successor in that post, Talbot Rice went through the English public school system (in his case Eton) to Oxford and into the higher reaches of public office by virtue of the openings those institutions gave him. By all accounts he used his advantages of birth and education well, doing important work in various archaeological sites in Turkey, Iraq and Iran before becoming a professor.   A s well as being an archaeologist and scholar Talbot Rice was an innovator. He introduced a new degree combining Fine Arts and Art History and wanted to establish an arts centre in the university. He died before he achieved the second aim. It was left to Giles Robertson to take the project on and the Talbot Rice gallery was finally...