The sky is blue and the sun shines bright in Boris Kustodiev’s painting Demonstration on Uristsky Square on the Day of the Opening of the Second Comintern Congress in July 1920. Nicholas II, the last Csar of Russia, has been overthrown. The Great War is finally over. And the government of Vladimir Lenin’s Bolsheviks are busy putting their vision … Continue reading
For a bona fide map nerd like myself, there may never have been an exhibition that I have anticipated quite as eagerly as the British Library’s Maps in the 20th Century: Drawing the Line. Indeed, any bona fide map nerd probably already knows about this exhibition and will have decided already to pay it a visit regardless of what … Continue reading
Where as my Open House London Saturday excursions were based exclusively in central London, my plan for Sunday involved travelling many more miles. Crystal Palace was a long way to travel to see a disused pedestrian subway, but the length of the queue when I arrived was an indication of how much interest this curious … Continue reading
Open House London has become a regular fixture for many of the London historians, museum efininados, exhibition regulars and lovers of all things London whose blogs and Twitter accounts I follow. And this was the year that I finally got to join the party. For those that don’t know, Open House London sees hundreds of buildings across … Continue reading
For more than a millennium, you could have been forgiven for thinking that Heracleion, Thonis and Canopus had never existed. Sure, these ancient cities on the mouth of the Nile had been mentioned numerous times by Greek writers, but mostly in the heroic tales of mythological figures. Heracleion was supposed to have been founded on the site where Herakles had first set … Continue reading
Its name in Greek, Hebrew and Arabic means ‘middle sea’. The Romans knew it as the sea in ‘the middle of the land’, and it is from Latin that its modern name derives. Because, right up until the discovery of the Americas, the Mediterranean sea was the centre of the known world. And slap bang in the middle of the … Continue reading
On one of the exhibitionologist’s first forays into exhibition reviewing, back in 2012, I found myself at an exhibition all about William Shakespeare. Hosted by the British Museum and accompanied by a BBC Radio 4 series, Shakespeare: Staging the World was jam packed full of objects that each, in some way, related to the events, the places and … Continue reading
It appeared on newsagent shelves in September of 1916, and cost a shilling. The first ever issue of British Vogue promised its readers that ‘really and truly, such amazing things are going to happen to you that you would never believe them unless you saw them in Vogue.’ Not bad for a mission statement. And proof … Continue reading
In 1707 the Welsh linguist and antiquary Edmund Lhuyd published the Archaeologia Brittanica, in which he described the ‘Languages, Histories And Cultures of the Original Inhabitants of Great Britain‘. If it were not for the publication of this book then the British Museum’s new Celts: Art & Identity exhibition probably could not have happened. Were it … Continue reading
In the great hall of Christ’s Hospital School in Horsham, West Sussex, there hangs a gigantic painting showing an enthroned King James II receiving the mathematical scholars of the school, painted between 1684 and 1690 by Antonio Verrio. Its impressive scale makes its extensive cast of figures appear practically life-size. Among the great crowd of dukes, earls, soldiers, bishops, courtiers and … Continue reading
the Exhibitionologist 