I went to hear the historian Lucy Inglis talking about 18th-century London at the V&A this afternoon, a journey that would have been worth it even if she had only delivered the section about the gin craze of the early 18th century. Drunken men had long been a familiar sight in the streets but gin, […]
There has been much discussion of the origin of the hat that Pharrell wore at the Grammys the other night… …with style pundits quick to point out it was a Vivienne Westwood piece, revived in 201o after an original design in her Buffalo Girls (Nostlagia of Mud) collection (see GQ’s backgrounder here). That collection was […]
I take the 6 am train from St Pancras to Lille to visit Neuve Chappelle in northern France, and Ypres in Belgium, sites of First World War battles in which my great-grandfather Walter Parkin fought a century ago. Around Neuve Chappelle the flat, heavy land is dank, the water in the ditches a reminder of […]