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Consider the paradox of lemons. In Italy, one associates them with scented groves. A few years ago, Helena Attlee wrote the book The Land Where Lemons Grow, in which citrus fruits become a golden thread running through the history of Italian agriculture. Yet though the lemon is arguably the most beautiful of fruits, its tart
The inspiration behind ‘Lev’s Violin, An Italian Adventure’ is the subject of a crowdfunding campaign that seeks to fix the instrument’s broken neck
Lev's Violin by Helena Attlee review – a musical quest Jamie Mackay © Provided by The Guardian Photograph: Miguel Medina/AFP/Getty Images One summer’s night, at a concert in a small Welsh town, Helena Attlee finds herself blown away by the sound of an exotic stringed instrument. The timbre is sweet and rotund, like nothing she’s heard before. After the encore she hunts down the performer, a man named Greg, who plays with one of Britain’s major symphony orchestras, to find out more about his instrument. Greg tells her that his violin was once owned by a Russian man n...
For a work of conceptual art, Roelof Louw’s Soul City (Pyramid of Oranges) (1967) is unusually generous. Some 5,800 oranges are stacked neatly in a wooden frame on the floor of a gallery. Then visitors are allowed to help themselves to the fruit. By the time I saw it in the big conceptual art show at Tate Britain in 2016, the pyramid had dwindled: it looked more like a ball pit for toddlers, as improvised by a greengrocer. Louw’s oranges, in their abundance and with their more or less uniform shapes, are everyday things; you might see them piled like this, if not in such quantities, on a...
There’s an episode of Yes Minister called ‘Equal Opportunities’. Minister Jim Hacker is under pressure to recruit more women to the civil service. The hunt is on for female mandarins. ‘Ah,’ says principal private secretary Bernard. ‘Sort of… satsumas?’ At this time of year, I can’t help thinking of Bernard as I hover in the Co-op over nets of tangerines, mandarins, clementines, satsumas and ‘easy peelers’, whatever they are. ’Tis the season for citrus. For oranges at the bottom of stockings, for Buck’s Fizz on Christmas morning, for smoked salmon blinis with slices ...