Books & Boots

 When Colonel Bailey, in the field-grey uniform of the enemy, walked away from his unsuspecting Cheka shadows on the evening of 20 October 1918, he embarked on a series of adventures whose bizarre climax even John Buchan might have thought far-fetched.
(Typical slice of the boys’ adventure tone which dominates Peter Hopkirk’s books: ‘Settin...

‘Tibet is not open to foreigners and anyone attempting to enter the country does so at his own risk…’
(Lord Curzon when under-secretary at the Foreign Office, 1898)

Peter Hopkirk perfected his technique in his first book, ‘Foreign Devils on the Silk Road’. He spent chapter one mapping out the geography and history of the part of the silk ...

The 2024 ‘Silk Roads’ exhibition at the British Museum (BM) made a big deal of overthrowing old stereotypes about the silk road in a number of ways.

For a start 1) the cura...

Born in 1969 in London, Cecil Brown was a member of the Young British Artists (YBA) generation which shot to prominence in the blockbuster 1997 Sensation exhibition. In several interviews I’ve read her explaining that, in that time and place and among that group, painting wasn’t valued, compared to all the other, more impactful media being pioneered by her peer...

Born in July 1937, David Hockney, now 88, is the grand old man of English painting. In 2003 he returned from living in Los Angeles where he did all those paintings of swimming pools, to his boyhood home of Bridlington in East Yorkshire. Here for the next ten years he developed a new and distinctive style for painting landscape, big simplified ...