The Scottish Enlightenment gets a single chapter, Wales is hardly mentioned and Ireland – though certain writers are co-opted – is “outside my terms of reference”. It is a pity he did not call it “The Englishness of English Art”, but Pevsner, who attempted something similar, and from a sharper intellectual perspective, used that for his Reith lectures published in 1956.The second crucial definition is what constitutes “the arts”. Though this is in effect a cultural history, embracing religion, philosophy and science, and grounded in ideology, Strong uses “culture” as an adjectival noun, rather than a critical concept. His territory goes beyond what he calls “the high arts: opera, ballet, drama, literature, music, painting and sculpture” to take in architecture and the decorative arts.In the light of his predilections, it is not surprising that he is good on gardening and the lost art of the masque Photography, cinema and television are hardly mentioned.

This is by no means a coffee- table book, and its generous and well-captioned illustrations support a serious text. The project demanded self-confidence, and a point of view – attributes Strong has never lacked. He describes himself as “not only an unashamed elitist but also a monarchist, a practising Christian, and a committed European”. With the exception of the last, Strong must feel he embodies his definition of the “spirit of Britain”.
This confident self-definition leads to an equally confident delineation of his subject. Dennis himself marries again to the woman he believe he wronged. Yet the arguments about faith and fate which pulse through the novel cannot be contained by a neat ending.. Having given us The Story of Britain, a linear overview of British history, in 1996, Sir Roy Strong now offers what he says is the first ever “continuous unfolding narrative” of Britain’s arts.

“It attracts the kind of jet-set crowd that helped catapult Ibiza into orbit a decade ago.”Where: Jiak Kim Street, Singapore (00 65 738 2988).How much: pounds 15.07 The Bowgee Inn, CornwallThe Cornish venue where Aphex Twin began his DJ career is a converted pub/disco in a village outside Newquay. Although they’re deadly serious about their music, there are a few quirky touches about the club’s design. The people who manage to find it are a mix of loyal locals and sussed tourists.”Where: Crantock, Cornwall (01637 830363).How much: pounds 4.08 Ultra Schall, MunichThe pride of Germany over the past decade, Ultra Schall is a cutting- edge exponent of new electronic music, located in a Munich industrial park. “It’s gone quite shiny and glammy now,” reports Rowan Chernin, “but its still got a unique vibe for such an obscure venue. “This is one of the best clubs in Asia,” believes Emma Warren. Today, the Wag remains a draw, both for its iconic status and for Saturday’s Blow-Up sessions, which although not as wild as their glory days at Camden’s Laurel Tree pub, provide a fine Northern soul workout that seems groovily at home in the Wag’s dark, sweaty confines.Where: 35 Wardour Street, London W1 (0171-437 5534).How much: pounds 8.06 Zouk, SingaporeOnce described as “a cross between a Venetian palace and a superclub”, the hedonism of Zouk is in stark contrast to Singapore’s sober society. Hardly surprising, then, that the club has been the target of several police drug raids.

“You’re drinking bourbon, eating blackened catfish, watching pelicans swooping into the river below, and thinking, `This is surely one of the most bizarre discos on the planet’.”Where: 9 Regents Street West, Belize City, Belize (00 501 2 73054).How much: free.05 The Wag, LondonDuring the 1980s, the Wag changed the face of London clubbing by inviting promoters in to run different nights – a revolutionary move for the time. The result was a club that attracted pivotal bands and DJs from the era, including Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Sade, the Pogues, Bananarama, Andrew Weatherall and Mark Moore. “And the Belcove Hotel’s bar/club is an edgy experience – but a great one, too.” The Belcove usually has lock-ins from about 9pm, and the party continues until sunrise. “There you are in a club full of local hookers in dodgy wigs dancing to everything from drum’n'bass to country and western,” continues Jennifer.

And novelists, as you don’t need me to remind you, do not have views.Because they are necessarily unintuitive, undivided and monotonic, views are antithetical to literature. They are also easier to hold than literature is to write, which is why they outnumber literature by millions to one We are drowning in views If anything will finish us a species, views will Hence the importance of a literary festival. The problem was that as she was a current affairs person her entire auricular system was wired only for the reception of views. Not a twitch of a thumb in common, though, when a writer meets a current affairs person, not so much as a mote in the other’s eye.I did Newsnight once, suffering a species of intergalactic non-communication interview with a person whose name sounded like Thirsty Work and who thought I was raving mad. I can’t say I have noticed that on his morning radio programme. I’m not complaining; I do not make a habit of tuning into Humphrys before breakfast in the hope of hearing him evincing literary affinities Frankly, I would not expect them of him.

Humphrys’ sphere is current affairs, and current affairs is to literature what chalk is to cheese. Any writer who has ever been lured into a current affairs discussion, on radio or on television, will tell you that the experience resembles nothing so much as being kidnapped by headless automata and deposited on the Moon. The fact that he is rumoured to want to write a novel does not alter that Everybody wants to write a novel Most people already have. The only person I know who has not so far written a novel is my mother, and she is spending more time at her word processor than she used to.It is also rumoured that John Humphrys feels a special affinity for the literary world. The Moon, I say, not the planet Saturnalia where, while the population may be wordless, they do at least acknowledge bodily resemblance to us. Death by small persistent puppy.Reports of John Humphrys appearing at the Edinburgh Literary Festival, however, raise matters of more serious concern For John Humphrys is not a literary figure. Which is why reports of John Humphrys giving the controller of BBC1 a roasting at the Edinburgh Television Festival made satisfying reading.

“I have to be able to see the redeeming side – even of an unsympathetic character. Horsfield, herself a mother of four, and responsible for such dramas as Making Out, The Riff Raff Element and Born to Run, has made a speciality out of these family sagas But her characters are never mere ciphers. Think, for example, of the marvellously plausible, weak-willed adulterer Byron (Keith Allen) in Born to Run. While dismissing talk of a generation of “hot Scots” led by Ewan McGregor and Robert Carlyle, McFadden is pleased that actors from north of the border are no longer being asked to play parts involving only a kilt or a Claymore. “People now realise that you can have a regional accent and be a good actor,” he says “People are hungry for something different. They are sick of seeing costume dramas with plummy English accents.

They want a more real picture of life.”One such is painted by Sex, Chips and Rock’n'Roll. So I wanted to write about the girls who were very much brought up with Victorian repression coming into contact with the new culture, as represented by the band. What happens when those cultures collide is what creates the dramatic tension.”Coming on the back of such acclaimed dramas as The Crow Road, Small Faces, Bumping the Odds and Dad Savage, the role of Dallas merely underlines McFadden’s status as a leading figure in the much-hyped “Cool Caledonia” movement. Particularly in northern provincial towns, they were just coming out of the war For many, they were just coming out of the Victorian era. Things like abortion were still illegal, and single mothers were unheard of.”"The image of the Sixties is of great liberation, of swinging London with women on the Pill,” Horsfield chips in “But for many, it wasn’t quite like that.

You may be surprised to learn that in many ways I had a most underprivileged background. But are they not the twin pillars of civilisation?”I am sure he was right, whatever he meant by it.yours etcFrom Lord NearboughSir, Alan Clark is often said to have been a snob, but there was more to him than that. I remember once he said to me, “You know, Diddles, on the cricket field all men are equal, at least until given out. Nowhere in the series, for instance, is cricket or sex mentioned.

From Mr George “Gubby” Trotter OBE
Sir, in all the richly deserved tributes which have poured out to my old friend Alan Clark MP, I have seen none that mentioned his very real love of cricket. He once said to me, “You know, Gubby, my father may have had a title, taste, money and a huge house, but he had very little else. If you look again at his TV series on Civilisation, you will notice that he talks only about expensive objects – his view of life was the view from Asprey’s window He avoided the finer things of life altogether. None had any creative ambition, for instance to emulate the great developers of the past and to leave behind as their monument an Edinburgh New Town or, like Thomas Cubitt, a new Belgravia.On a recent train journey in Belgium, Holland and Germany I was always seeing new housing developments in a cheerful, attractive style essentially of our own time Why won’t they build them in England?. IN THE wake of the death of the late lamented Alan Clark MP, I have received many letters of tribute to him, and think it only right to print a selection of them. Nowadays nobody knows who is behind the sprawling housing estates.
The Portsmouth Society is concerned mainly with trying to encourage good design in new building and to discourage dross.

We are continually dismayed by the standard of design of new buildings of all types but especially housing and especially the products of Housing Associations.It was sad to find that these tycoons of the building industry had only commercial ambitions. Sir: Sally Chatterton’s “Who’s the builder most worthy of house room?” (Business Review, 8 September), with the men mainly responsible for house- building, was very valuable although deeply depressing; but she didn’t ask: “Why don’t you employ good architects?”

When the New Towns were built in the 1950s, distinguished architects like Eric Lyons and Frederick Gibberd were well known to be involved in the design of the houses. Few are now willing to deal with the bad publicity involved in hosting arms shows, let alone, perhaps, the guilty consciences.
If everyone who not only wanted Britain to stop selling arms to the Indonesians, but who also wanted us to stop our other extensive dealings with regimes such as Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Sri Lanka, made it clear to the Government that they cannot continue to “deal in death” in our name – perhaps by joining our protest outside DSEi in Chertsey and Docklands – then they wouldn’t be able to get away with it for much longer.. As a result of peaceful protest the Copex private arms show has been forced to change venue three times. In 1997 more than 1,000 protesters descended on a British armed-forces-sponsored arms exhibition. Moreover, peace campaigning can be very effective, especially when it is sustained – not only in putting pressure on the Government and raising public awareness, but in the most direct cases, such as when four women disarmed an Indonesia-bound BAe Hawk jet in 1996, stopping the delivery of the weapons altogether.

Yet if it were not for the actions of thousands of ordinary people protesting against the arms trade and exposing hypocrisy, we would not be witnessing now the the Government’s backtracking on sales of Hawk jets and other military equipment to Indonesia. And the public knowledge that Robin Cook’s so-called “ethical foreign policy” consists of regularly arming other repressive regimes and fuelling human rights abuses, continues to be more than “mildly embarrassing” for the Government. DAVID AARONOVITCH, while claiming to be morally opposed to Britain’s role in the arms trade, appears to suggest that there’s little we can do to stop it. But given what’s at stake, it’s worth having a go at challenging the entrenched acceptance of violence among many young men.As Michael Massey, the director of the short film about date rape, said last week, “If it changes the attitude of just one man, then it will have been worth it.”. We still need to work for changes in policy that will bring more rapists to justice and protect women from violence. If these programmes are successful in challenging young men’s attitudes, why shouldn’t they be imitated elsewhere?No educational campaign will suddenly wipe out men’s violent behaviour.

Looking up into one of Gough’s sectional ceilings – modelled exactly on Soane – you can see the lanterns that beam light down through three floors cut up with the walkways in Soane’s own home. To warm up the grey northerly light Soane lined these lanterns with amber glass and painted his breakfast room a zingy yellow. Mirrors pasted in the most unlikely places – the back of pictures or bulbous eyes on doors – bounce back light and Gough has hung one of the doors from the museum at the RA. This fantastic precursor of so much of modern architecture is revealed with all the tricks and illusions that traditional Beaux Arts-trained architects, with their love of architectural neo-classicism, ignored and put Soane out of fashion. “Fighting the overblown boudoir classicism under those vast cornices was very un-Soane-like.” Gough’s strong structural installations reduce the impact of the RA to offer us axial routes and vistas as seductive as Soane’s.Then Gough lets us join the Magic Circle to find out what makes Soanian tricks work, and banish Soane’s epitaph – “picturesque” – forever.

“Frankly it would have been easier to do it in the Hayward,” Gough admits. When you think of one’s actual experience of ceilings, you mean wall, ceiling, enclosure and light.”Setting up this exhibition of Soane’s coolly elegant, honed-down classicism in the RA was no mean feat as its architecture enshrines precisely the aesthetic Soane rejected. It was Philip Johnson who declared that John Soane was “really a ceiling architect That’s not trying to make him look small. He also decided to show us how Soane manipulates both space and light by building replicas of the domes at Lincoln’s Inn Fields to demonstrate how they wrap around entire rooms to become the walls.Soane’s pendentive domes, outstretched like bats’ wings pinioned to the corners of the room, turn the ceilings into membranous shelters. The exhibition’s designer, Piers Gough of CZWG, used those dimmer light levels to create pools of light in a rather Soanian way. Worse, many of the architectural perspectives are watercolours which fade under high levels of light, so the four galleries in the RA are purposefully dimmed down.

He picked up the ball, staring at the seam and bouncing it lightly in his hand to appreciate its weight and firmness.”Where’s your gloves?” he asked.”Ain’t no gloves, homey. Nobody in the ‘hood had much idea what they were doing there, much less what this strange sport of theirs might be.
Sergio approached, wearing the trademark baggy pants of Latino gang members and dragging a bulldog on a thick chain behind him He looked mean as hell.”Hey, what is this?” he asked “Some kind of baseball game?”"No, man This is cricket,” was the answer “Baseball’s a sissy game.”Sergio watched for a few minutes. But something odd was going on in his neighbourhood, and he decided to check it out. On an uneven, unwatered sports field behind one of Compton’s typically destitute middle schools, a raggedy band of bums scooped up off the streets of downtown Los Angeles and a handful of teenage homeboys from the city’s blasted hinterland were smashing at a hard red ball with long wooden bats. Three years ago, Sergio Pinales had never heard of cricket He really had no reason to. He was your typical gangland chulo, a bad-ass Latino teenager straight out of Compton, with bad-ass short-cropped hair, a bad-ass earring in his left ear, disconcertingly well-developed biceps and a hardened stare that took no prisoners.

But was it any worse than the stuff you see in public spaces in the West, painted for mere commercial gain? I don’t think so.”`Aufstieg und Fall der Moderne’ continues at the Mehrszweckhalle, Weimar, until 9 November. Yes, a lot of the official art was rubbish, produced to order. “It reminds me of the way the Nazis exhibited so-called Degenerate Art,” says Frau Schaeffer “It’s a denunciation, not an exhibition. Originally, they were jumbled up like an auctioneer’s job lot The random nature of the selection still offends.

Memories (above) is like most people’s actual memories, an accretion of things. Some artists are quick developers and get stuck in a groove early on, but it took time for me to develop. My friend Patrick Caulfield says painters never stop working, and I do work very hard. “I don’t think it helps it to be taken seriously.”

New works by Howard Hodgkin can be seen at the Anthony d’Offay Gallery, 9, 23, 24 Dering Street, London W1, 12 November to 15 January 2000 (0171-499 4100).
`End of the Day’, 1999 “All the paintings in my exhibition are oil on wood but they vary in size.

I try very hard to limit the kind of marks I use, they are very simple, very straightforward, they’re what I call my language My paintings sometimes take a number of years to complete. End of the Day is quite small, and refers to a particular end of day I’m often asked about my brushwork. Most of all he regrets the low regard in which painting is held, although he says there are signs of a resurgence “It is still done so much by amateurs,” he notes. It’s a measure of how much the art scene has changed since then that he is now viewed by some as establishment: his paintings grace government buildings, he is to be spotted at gatherings of the great and the good, while recent public commissions have included the giant mural for the British Film Institute’s new Imax cinema in London and New Worlds, for the Post Office’s millennium stamp series. In fact Hodgkin, now 67, is if anything anti-establishment, and dismissive of the Government and its vaunted promotion of Britain as a hothouse of creativity “Politically, art is nobody’s priority,” he asserts. “As with all forms of art, some is terrific and some isn’t,” is the nearest this country’s great abstract colourist gets to a criticism of the continuing hegemony of art-school cleverness at The Tate and elsewhere Hodgkin himself won the Turner, in 1985.

The outdoor cinema belonged to the Livadia Sanatorium, which is housed in the same Romanoff palace where Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt carved out the new world order in 1945. The Buildings, Roads and Machinery Sanatorium in Odessa changed its name to the Magnolia Sanatorium in 1995. But over the course of three generations, ideology embeds itself deeply, and it is difficult to see how such a simplistic image makeover was ever really expected to work. Although the corridor, with its peeling paint and rusting radiators, appears to be leading somewhere, it is no longer headed to the promised land. Instead, what it more properly shows is a vision of the future that failed. Outdoor cinema, Livadia Sanatorium, near YaltaLong before the Soviet Union fell apart, Lenin’s 1920 decree “On the Use of the Crimea for the Treatment of the Working People” had begun to ring hollow.

Yet the version of it they promulgated was often impractical and doctrinaire. After the collapse of communism, institutions made an effort to adapt to the larger post-ideological world. The Soviet authorities fetishised science, holding it up as a cultural model that would allow life to be lived in an ever more rational way. Lifts were constructed to overcome these natural obstacles, since a socialist utopia that could put a man into space should certainly be able to convey vacationing comrades to the beach Nowadays, few of these devices still work. Even though this one has found new life as a cruising spot for gay Odessans, it, like the greater part of the Valery Tchakalov Sanatorium it once served, now stands quite derelict.Corridor, Magnolia Sanitorium, OdessaWith a little effort of imagination it is possible to picture this corridor when it was first built – a gleaming white arcade reflecting the totalitarian regime’s conception of modernity.

The Black Sea coast is precipitous and cliffy and many sanatoriums are hundreds of feet above the sea. As a result, although it may not be in pristine condition, it has certainly fared better than many of its counterparts. Pictured above is the spider-plant-filled TV room and, above right, the lecture hall.Lift shaft to beach, Valery Tchakalov Sanatorium, OdessaMarxist doctrine has it that history propels mankind along an evolutionary path, ending with the satisfaction of every material need. Bathing is also encouraged – pictured opposite are a row of waterfront changing cabins.Public rooms, Odessa SanitoriumUnder communism every sanatorium was affiliated to a trade union. Members earned their three weeks of sun, sea and treatment through a combination of loyalty to the party and hard grind The Odessa Sanatorium used to belong to the KGB. Although sanatoriums were to be found right across the country, the Black Sea coast was considered a prize destination, reserved for party bigwigs and model workers.

The men are not quite gigolos, more paid male escorts, I suppose, and the women, well, they are widowed or single or lonely The guys learn to be great ballroom dancers. Crissy is now 18 and writes poetry.`Vera Antinoro, Rhoda Camporato, and Murray Goldman’, Luigi’s American Italian Club, Miami, Florida, 1993Mark scours as many newspapers as she can in a quest for the unusual, and at one point she employed a team of researchers to help her find stories. To her, the most interesting concern is ordinary people – “the unfamous”, as she calls them – and the best essays come from the periphery of the American dream. Seven years later, their fortunes had not perceptibly changed.

Jesse and Crissy, the two kids, were not attending school and there were now two more, Ashley and Summer Here they are squatting in an abandoned ranch Mark is still in touch with them Recently Dean and Linda split up. Eventually they were admitted to a temporary shelter, where Crissy, clearly traumatised, lay in a foetal position in the shower. She photographed the Damm family twice, first in 1987 and later in 1994 Both times were pivotal in the family’s lives. On the first occasion they had just been thrown out of a shelter and, though they were sometimes housed in a motel for the weekend, they stayed mostly in their sedan car.

One of the pictures by the fan is of the RVPB penthouse Alan designed in 1985 for Andy Taylor of Duran Duran “I love this building,” he says. I painted this room red and the hall purple, but I want to keep the mezzanine neutral, or it’s overkill. He counts himself one of the RVPB’s “new breed”: “I spend a lot of time travelling and I’m rarely in the bar.” The photographs are of his Irish ancestors “I wanted to optimise the Gothic feel. Also breaking up the otherwise stark white of the walls is a large photograph of a woman in fishnets, taken in the flat next door by a fetish photographer who used to live at the RVPB.Cian O’Hare26, works in the City Resident for four monthsCian bought his 1,600sq ft two-bed flat in the north courtyard from the photographer grandson of the ex-king of Egypt. “I’d be going to bed at six and getting up at seven, three days a week. It’s great for a bit but you don’t end up making much money.” He has kept mosaics and murals which were there when he moved in.

It gained a reputation for its swinging bachelor parties as an assortment of divorced middle- aged men began to colonise the flats and monopolise the building’s restaurant and bar, Le Gothique. But now they are starting to make way for City boys and girls, if only for the sake of their health.
Who’s in your house?If you are a group of people who live, or work, within the same building and would like to be featured on this page, write to Who’s in the House?, The Independent Magazine, One Canada Square, Canary Wharf, London E14 5DL, giving a contact phone number, your address, and details of the type of building you occupy. Please also include recent photographs (which you do not want returned) of your homes or offices.Adam Whipps34, management consultantResident for five yearsAdam is about to move out of his one-bed flat in the north courtyard “You get drawn in,” he says. These days the regime is more lax, even, some might say, quite debauched. Fathers set free from their families are now more likely to be found at the RVPB than fatherless children. After serving as a hospital in the First World War, a detention centre in the Second, and a comprehensive school well into the Eighties, the grade-two listed building was converted into 29 luxury flats plus workshops and a drama school.

Queen Victoria would turn in her grave. In 1857, she laid the foundation stone of the Royal Victoria Patriotic Building in Wandsworth, London, built by public subscription to house children orphaned by the Crimean war. But its fiercely Gothic turrets, echoing cloisters, and chilly iron stairways proved a poor substitute for the family home – in 1862 a girl called Charlotte died in a fire while locked in solitary confinement in a bathroom It was finally shut down in 1938. Place 3 thin slices of goat’s cheese on top of each, and place briefly under a hot grill until the cheese starts to melt Serve, garnished with a little rock salt and parsley.. Place on a low heat, and slowly cook the onion until soft and golden Remove from the stove, and allow to cool.2. Roll out the puff pastry to make four discs 3mm (1/4 in) thick and 130mm (5in) in diameter, and chill them.3. Turn the tarts out onto plates, pouring over them any juices from the pans.5.

In 10cm (4in) ramekins, place the puff pastry discs on top of the onion halves, and fold down the sides. Put each dish in the oven and cook for 15 to 20 minutes, until the pastry is golden brown.4. For each onion half put 10g each of butter and sugar in a non-stick blini pan, and push the half onion into the butter. Any sort of goat’s milk cheeses, which the French call chevres, will do – and there is a huge variety, in all shapes and sizes, to choose from.2 large Spanish onions, skinned40g unsalted butter40g caster sugar200g puff pastry100g goat’s cheeserock saltflat-leaf parsley to garnish1 Preheat the oven to 200C/400F/gas mark 6 Top and tail the onions, and cut them in half. Place the shallots, parsley, capers, gherkins and eggs in five separate piles on the edge of the smoked salmon, and put the lemons in the middle.3. Make the horseradish cream by mixing together the horseradish sauce, cream, cayenne and lemon juice, and serve it in a little jug on the side, with the buttered brown bread.Tarte tatin of caramelised onion and goat’s cheeseServes 4If you have your puff pastry already made, this is a quick dish to produce and a popular starter.