Housing and Development Newsletter
Bear in mind the term did not come from any of the painters so-designated, but from the art critic Robert Coates who applied it to the New York artists in 1946. The term itself was coined in Germany (where else?) in 1919, and was first used to characterize the work of a specific artist (Wassily Kandinsky), in 1929. Many of the painters on the list have vehemently denied that their work was abstract.
My “American Heritage Dictionary“ lists five principal definitions of abstract, of which only the fifth has anything to do with art: Designating a genre of painting whose intellectual and affective content depends solely on intrinsic form.
Stephen Roberts
Cromwell s Castle from the air
- Credit: Historic England
It’s about quality, not quantity. That was my feeling when I delved into Cornish castles. There aren’t oodles; possibly due to being a separatist community in the South West. The Normans were great castle builders, erecting fortresses to cow the defeated English into submission. Perhaps in Cornwall it wasn’t necessary, well, not on such a scale anyway.
There are around 20 castles in the county, which is not a huge number, but there are exquisite examples other counties would give their touristy right arm for. Here follows my countdown of the top eight, and in the best traditions, I will leave best to last.
Statues of former US presidents in Croaker, Virginia. Photograph: Randy Duchaine/Alamy
Before the 17th century, people did not think of themselves as belonging to something called the white race. But once the idea was invented, it quickly began to reshape the modern world
Tue 20 Apr 2021 01.00 EDT
In 2008, a satirical blog called Stuff White People Like became a brief but boisterous sensation. The conceit was straightforward, coupling a list, eventually 136 items long, of stuff that white people liked to do or own, with faux-ethnographic descriptions that explained each item’s purported racial appeal. While some of the items were a little too obvious – indie music appeared at #41, Wes Anderson movies at #10 – others, including “awareness” (#18) and “children’s games as adults” (#102), were inspired. It was an instant hit. In its first two months alone, Stuff White People Like drew 4 million visitors, and it wasn’t long before a book based on the blog became a Ne