FQR14

Ecce, mundus est Marilyn in the pool and on the screen

Mark Birley: a companion’s moving tribute

issin M

£10

uarterly Review ey •

Finch’s

I

k Birl

g Mar

Issue 14: Winter 2011

sordidus et olidus, sed etiam habet multas res smashingae

Seasonal survival guide: 30 top tips for being taken hostage

Charles’s chums: Kevin “Dick the Shit” Spacey, Julian “the poet” Sands

Transylvania and wolves special report

Gerald Benney: a son’s moving tribute

Kenneth MacMillan: a daughter’s moving tribute

F

Russian art, Backgammon, 2 pages of pictures of Charles Finch’s events (not enough), Matthew Modine’s nightmare, Kate Lenahan’s bullock cart

CH STAR IN L

E IN

Courtesy of MSG entertainment

Paqu eb old si ot Special z E now e, new typ dition: e ef v en m ore in ace erfect p t e h h si an ev T Gift: er de tmas Chris oubling sd FQR’ Special e b cu page 12 e f f O r

We’ll Always Have Christmas Modern Christmas isn’t necessarily, or even usually, about religion any more. And, says Nick Foulkes, if it offers hope, escape from the drudgery of everyday life, benevolence towards one’s fellow man – and oysters – what’s so wrong with that?

N

orman Collins’s brilliant novel London Belongs To Me begins in a City office at Christmas time. It is much like any office today, except that it is 4.30pm on Friday 23 December 1938, when “Bethlehem now brooded encouragingly over London”. If you haven’t read this novel, give it a go over Christmas – it is fun, it sold hundreds of thousands of copies in 1946 and was made into a film

by Sidney Gilliat.

What I love about this opening chapter is the entirely secular way in which Christmas is evoked.

Collins captures the familiar sense that Christmas, although it has been in the diary for a while, seems to have taken everyone in London by surprise and, in the final hours, they are shopping like mad, as if preparing for a long siege.

We see the owner of the company, Mr Battlebury, rushing round Hamleys and Fortnum’s, where he buys a large box of crystallised fruit “not because he or anyone else in his family, particularly liked crystallised fruit but because it had been there on the counter and he was in the mood for buying things”. And after his arduous shopping trip he rewards himself with some

Winter 2011

things he does like: a plate of oysters and a bottle of hock at Scott’s (at the mention of Scott’s and oysters I can’t quite get the picture of this paper’s eponym, Charles Finch, out of my mind).

Meanwhile, as their boss is downing his oysters and buying his crystallised fruit, the girls in the office are exchanging Christmas cards.

“The girls had most of them already exchanged Christmas cards,” writes Collins. “There was no obvious reason why they should have done so. They had spent the whole of the previous twelve months sharing the same office, and drinking tea together at eleven o’clock every morning and 3.30 every afternoon, and giving each other pieces of chocolate and aspirins. But for the past two or three days they had been behaving as though they had been parted for years. They had been distributing views of snowbound coaches and lighted taverns and children tobogganing, and robins and boys bearing holly and old bellmen crying Oyez! as though Noël and the 18th century were the same thing, and life depended on celebrating both.”

It is a great passage because it gets to the heart of modern Christmas: a season of mild inebriation, exaggerated goodwill to one’s fellow man, the exchange of superfluous gifts, the central importance of the snow-bound coaching scene (surely Britain’s greatest contribution to world culture) and all the rest of it. And you know what, life really does depend on

celebrating Noël – and the religion is optional.

Christmas as we know it today was invented during the Victorian age: Dickens’s Christmas Carol, Henry Cole’s Christmas card, the Prince Consort’s popularisation of the Christmas tree. And it is surely no coincidence that it was during the age of Victoria that science began to replace religion as the foundation of our beliefs: you can blame Mr Darwin for upsetting that particular apple cart and setting in train a series of events that has given us the strident atheism of Mr Dawkins. (Please note it is not Mr Dawkins’s lack of religious beliefs that I mind, just the strength and irrepressible vigour with which he does not hold them.) he thing about Christmas is that it could hardly come at a better time of year and, whatever you call it – and before we called it Christmas it used be celebrated as the winter solstice – it is something to look forward to at an otherwise fairly bleak time of year. When you pause to think about it, Christmas is a remarkable human creation: we give each other presents, take a few days off work and eat mince pies. And anything that encourages presents, sloth and mince pies must rank among the greatest legacies of civilisation.

Christmas offers us a bit of escape, it holds out the hope of a better world, whether it is the annoyingly elusive goal of goodwill to all men, or the rather more achievable aim of getting mildly squiffy at the office Christmas party and making inappropriate

T

1

suggestions to those among one’s co-workers one finds compellingly attractive.

God (who liked Christmas so much that he made sure his son was born on Christmas Day) knows they needed a bit of an escape from the drab and yet threatening reality of life in 1938. With the Great Depression just beginning to recede and the carnage of World War II coming up in a few scant months, who wouldn’t want to retreat from reality, buy a box of crystallised fruit (even if they did not particularly care for it), and lose oneself in a world of 18th-century-themed Christmas cards and plates of oysters at Scott’s.

Nor has the year that is now drawing to a close been a particularly easy one. I trust that we are not looking at another World War, but economic meltdown and harsh repression for some of those around the world who just fancy a bit of democracy now and then have made for an unsettling time.

Still, at least we have Christmas. And if the religion bit is a little hard for you to take, just stick with the goodwill, put your faith in Father Christmas, the presents, the crystallised fruit, the 18th-century coaching scenes and the plates of oysters at Scott’s.

Just be sure to book your table, as it gets awfully busy at this time of year.

Nick Foulkes is the editorial director of the FQR Group of Publications and Editor in Chief of Finch’s Quarterly Review

www.finchsquarterly.com

FQR Film Special

Finch, Film & Fellowship

Proprietor’s Spouse: Sydney Ingle-Finch

Art Director: Tristram Fetherstonhaugh Contributing editors: Vicki Reeve, Simon de Pury, Tom Stubbs, Kevin Spacey, Emma Thompson, Saffron Aldridge, L’Wren Scott Features Editor: Emilia Hungerford Managing Editor: Tom Chamberlin Editor at Large: Elisabeth von Thurn und Taxis Literary Editor: John Malkovich Aviation Editor: Annette Mason Photography Editor: Patrick Fetherstonhaugh Polo Editor: James McBride Chief Fashion Correspondent: Heather Kerzner Liberal at Large: Matthew Modine Film Editor: Adam Dawtrey Fine Arts Editor: Charles Saumarez Smith Cookery Editor: Maya Even PA to the Proprietor: Tiffany Grayson Highland Editor (19th Century): Charlie Gladstone Entrepreneur at Large: James Caan Hunting Editor: Reza Rashidian Racing Editor: The Hon. Harry Herbert Travel Editor: Kate Lenahan The FQR Group of Publications including: FQR Art; FQR Style; FQR Living Well, FQR Big Game Hunter, Game Shot and Conservation; FQR Equestrian Life; FQR Ocean Wave incorporating Nautical Style; FQR Home and Hearth; FQR Paranormal; FQR Faith (Formerly FQR Monotheism in the Modern Age); www.finchsquarterly.com Chief Executive: Charles Finch Editorial Director: Nick Foulkes Creative Director: Tristram Fetherstonhaugh Commercial Director: Jonathan Sanders, Chief Financial Officer: Adam Bent Designed and produced by Fetherstonhaugh Associates www.fetherstonhaugh.com The views expressed in Finch’s Quarterly Review are not necessarily those of the editorial team.

The editorial team is not responsible or liable for text, pictures or illustrations, which remain the responsibility of the authors. Finch’s Quarterly Review is fully protected by copyright and nothing may be printed, translated or reproduced wholly or in part without written permission. Next issue: February 2012. All advertising and subscription enquiries should be sent for the attention of Tom Chamberlin: tom@finchsquarterly.com Tel: +44 (0)20 7851 7140.

Winter 2011

contributors from the film world Kevin Spacey, John Malkovich, Matthew Modine, Emma Thompson, Nick Broomfield, Jeremy Thomas and all the others who have broken bread with us or who we just like – Rachel Weisz, Elizabeth Banks, Drew Barrymore, Cate Blanchett, Marisa Tomei, Carey Mulligan, Penélope Cruz, the late Heath Ledger, Kristin Scott Thomas, George Clooney, Amy Adams, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Dustin Hoffman and Stephen Frears, to name but a few!

Recently we hosted a dinner for A Dangerous Method, David Cronenberg’s brilliant film written by Christopher Hampton and starring Viggo Mortensen, Keira Knightley and Michael Fassbender. Jung and Freud’s great friendship famously fell apart over the case study of X, who was Jung’s lover and later became a

T

he new year brings us at Finch’s Quarterly a step further in our passion for all things motion picture. After three years of hosting the Finch’s Quarterly Filmmakers Award supported by IWC at the Hôtel du Cap during the Cannes Film Festival, this year we renew our commitment to film by establishing the Finch’s Quarterly Filmmakers Fellowship and the Finch’s Quarterly Screening Programme.

Our filmmakers Fellowship will comprise directors, writers, producers and actors who have shown artistic excellence, spirit and general bonhomie in the pursuit of cinema. The fellowship will, naturally, include those nearest and dearest to this publication: our

renowned psychoanalyst in her own right. Cronenberg creates his brilliant canvas of sanity without reason with a clarity of vision that reminds us again of his insight into all things a little on the dark side. David is an FQR Fellow whether he likes it or not! Many years ago I executive produced a film of his, Spider, in which Ralph Fiennes starred. Ralph, you too are an automatic Fellow… And so we shall build the list. Watch this space.

The Finch’s Quarterly Screening Programme will see the paper host screenings in London, Paris and NYC. The selected films will include those yet to be on general release, as well as cinema classics. The three films I directed will not be shown, you will all be happy to hear!

Filmmakers will give a talk at each screening, and dinner and drinks will be served. Our aim is provide a unique insight from our Fellows in the world of cinema.

The Chill Of It All David Fincher’s eagerly awaited remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo comes loaded with controversy, says Adam Dawtrey

I

n Stockholm, they say that David Fincher wanted to repaint the Old Town for his remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but was politely refused. Whether true or not, the story certainly fits the stereotype of Hollywood hubris. The Swedes barely had time to bask in their biggest ever global hit – “Sweden’s scariest export since Abba,” in the words of its director Niels Arden Oplev – before Fincher came rushing in with $100m to slap his own gloss on the material, and show them how it should really be done.

The Swedes are too modest to be offended by such presumption. In fact, they seem thrilled by Fincher’s decision to stay true to the Swedishness of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium novels, rather than translating the storyline to America in the traditional Hollywood manner.

Oplev, however, was less impressed.

But then, he’s a Dane, and they are more assertive than their Scandinavian cousins. He understood that by making The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo again as a Swedish movie, Fincher is laying down a direct challenge to the original film. Anything you can do, I can do better – and history will only remember one winner.

In an unguarded moment, in which Oplev risked his own hopes of an American career by committing the outsider’s cardinal sin of publicly criticising Hollywood royalty, he unloaded his feelings to the website

Word & Film. He attacked Sony’s PR machine for attempting to obliterate Noomi Rapace’s performance in his film by “trying to make their Lisbeth Salander the lead Lisbeth Salander,” which he described as “highly unfair because Noomi has captured this part and it should always be all her.

That’s her legacy in a way I can’t see anyone else competing with.”

And he dug deeper: “Even in Ho l l y w o o d there seems to be a kind of anger about the remake, like, ‘Why would they remake something when they can just go see the original?’

Everybody who loves film will go see the original one. It’s like, what do you want to see, the French version of La Femme Nikita or the American one? You can hope that Fincher does a better job.”

If Oplev was hoping his words would be met with a rousing chorus of assent, he was sadly disappointed. Even in Sweden, it seems, the expectation is that Fincher will, indeed, do a better job.

Adam Dawtrey lifts the cover on the hottest movie of the Christmas season, and takes the temperature of the rest

T

his Christmas sees the arrival of new work

by Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese and Clint Eastwood, and the return of Tom Cruise in his most successful franchise. Yet the greatest buzz surrounds a film that’s as far from your standard Yuletide blockbuster as it’s possible to get.

Billing itself as “the feel bad movie of Christmas,” David Fincher’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo slouches into UK cinemas on Boxing Day to cut short the festive cheer.

Nothing else in Santa’s sack raises quite the same shiver of anticipation. But it’s a long time since so many cinematic gifts were still under wraps so late in the year.

Here’s a quick feel through the wrapping paper.

Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol Has the world been holding its breath for the return of this creaky Tom Cruise vehicle? Possibly not. But this is more than just a routine reboot, it’s the live-action directing début of Brad Bird, the genius behind Ratatouille, The Incredibles and, greatest of all, The Iron Giant.

We Bought A Zoo Family heartwarmers don’t come more toasty than this true story. Cameron Crowe directs Matt Damon as a single dad who moves his family to the countryside to run a struggling zoo, and

After all, this is not some Hollywood rent-a-hack, or even an old master past his prime, but arguably the most exciting director currently working within the studio system, coming off the biggest hit of his career, The Social Network.

If the Swedes are protective of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, it is Larsson’s book, not Oplev’s film, that they treasure. The late Larsson is a national hero, and the Swedes feel he deserves the best.

Oplev did a fine job on a limited budget. But no one regards the Swedish movie as an untouchable masterpiece, despite its Bafta for Best Foreign Language Film. There’s certainly still room for a Hollywood genius, with a Hollywood budget and the selfbelief to match, to give Larsson the blockbuster treatment.

The first trailer, cut to the spinetingling wail of Led Zep’s Immigrant Song as reinterpreted by Trent Reznor, raised the temperature. The imagery of Rooney Mara as Salander made Rapace

meets feisty local lass Scarlett Johansson.

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows The rule of thumb is that surprise hits spawn overblown and underpowered sequels (cf Pirates of the Caribbean), so the odds are that Guy Ritchie won’t manage to recapture the freshness and energy that made his first Sherlock Holmes an unexpected pleasure.

New Year’s Eve I don’t get Sarah Jessica Parker, but this seasonal construct is for those who do. Directed

by Garry Marshall, it’s a multistory edifice about the love lives of numerous New Yorkers, which intersect as the clock ticks towards 2012.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close Screw up your courage for a portentous tearjerker, directed by Stephen Daldry from Jonathan Safran Foer’s book about a precocious nine-year-old searching New York for the lock that matches a key left by his beloved father who died in the 9/11 attacks. Stars Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock, America’s ideal couple, with grandfather Max von Sydow hotly tipped for an Oscar.

Frankly, I’m not sure I’m strong enough.

Hugo Martin Scorsese’s first family film, in 3-D, features another boy whose dead father has left behind a mysterious key. But this story is set in 1930s Paris and promises to be altogether more fun.

War Horse Until Tintin came along, it had been a while since Steven Spielberg delivered a film worthy of his genius. So what chance lightning will strike twice in the space of two months? This World War I drama

5

look like the girl next door. The whole package screams no compromise on Larsson’s feminist fury about “men who hate women,” the original Swedish title of his novel.

Fincher, with the arrogance of a true artist, has placed a huge wager on his own talent. A lot of people around the world, even in America, saw the original film. In fact, Oplev’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo may qualify as the most successful foreign-language film ever to be remade into English. By keeping that Swedish setting, Fincher has left himself nowhere to hide.

If his version doesn’t measure up to the original, if the decision to have the characters speak English in Swedish accents comes across as ridiculous (all the more so since Daniel Craig, channelling the spirit of his Bond predecessor Sean Connery, seems to have stuck stubbornly to his own English cadence while all around adopt the singsong hurdy-gurdy of mockScandinavian), if the new ending which apparently departs significantly from the book falls flat – then the millions of Larsson fans worldwide will bury him with their scorn.

But if he succeeds in doing justice to Larsson, to his alter ego Blomkvist and, most especially, to Salander – and, of course, he will – then not only could he go one better than The Social Network at the box office and the Oscars, but the good people of Stockholm will probably also let him repaint their Old Town any colour he damn well pleases when he returns to make the sequels.

Adam Dawtrey is Finch’s Quarterly Review’s film critic

about a boy and his noble steed is based on a book by Michael Morpurgo, a script by Richard Curtis, and a stage show that was, by all accounts, mesmerisingly brilliant. So there’s every reason to hope.

J. Edgar I’m neither old enough nor American enough to get excited about Clint Eastwood’s biopic of J Edgar Hoover, even with Leo DiCaprio as the FBI boss. The memory of Eastwood’s turgid Mandela movie Invictus is too fresh. Unless this one has Hoover telling John F Kennedy to go ahead, make my day, I’ll pass.

The Iron Lady Possibly the only movie this Christmas that could be scarier than The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Is the world ready to love Margaret Thatcher? Can Meryl Streep finally win her third Oscar, 19 years and 12 nominations since her last one for Sophie’s Choice?

My instinct says no to both.

Puss In Boots 3D, Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chip-Wrecked, Happy Feet Two Three kiddie sequels (Puss In Boots is a Shrek spinoff) that you will only see if you have kids who cannot safely be left in a cinema alone. Take a flask of eggnog and hope the time passes painlessly (though, in the case of the latest Chipmunks, the odds aren’t great).

www.finchsquarterly.com

rks Animation L.L.C.

Editor in Chief: Nick Foulkes

“Action!” cries our esteemed proprietor Charles Finch, as he announces two new and exciting movie-centric FQR developments

© 2011 DreamWo

Proprietor: Charles Finch

FQR Film Special

Simon Curtis on his new film based on the relationship between Marilyn Monroe and a young assistant director during the 1956 filming of The Prince and the Showgirl

“A

Michelle recreating Marilyn’s dance from the film in Donal Woods’ recreation of the original sets. We tried to film at the authentic locations and unusually gained access to Eton College and Windsor Castle. I was particularly excited to be at Parkside, the house the newlywed Millers had rented whilst in England. We filmed Colin observing an emotional Marilyn sitting on the stairs after discovering Arthur’s journal in the exact spot it had actually taken place. n some ways the film plays as a love letter to a lost England and all of us working on it paid great attention to detail. There was so much reference material for us to look at, and Colin’s books were the best source of all. His tone of voice guided me and his portrait of Marilyn as a very bright woman who, despite her troubled childhood, was trying to make the best of her life was important.

Thanks to Colin’s insights, I saw her as an ambitious actress, desperate to be taken seriously, struggling with a very thin part.

She was not helped by a director who insisted on working in a way that made her uncomfortable. I admire Lord Olivier very much and remember seeing him towards the end of his life at the opening of the National Theatre. He was scathing of Marilyn’s performance whilst they were making the film but later generously acknowledged how much the camera loved her and came to see how very good she actually was.

Marilyn had come to England with such high hopes. She was newly married to Miller, a producer apparently in control of her own destiny and about to work with the greats of British theatre. The sadness of our story is how each of her dreams collapsed during the making of the film. Her marriage lasted a few more years and, sadly, she was only to live for six more.

I regret that I never met Colin Clark, but I am truly honoured to have made the film of his two diaries. I am grateful for the support of his family and delighted that on their visits to the set they appeared to recognise and admire Eddie Redmayne’s excellent performance as “Colin”. I have taken a cue for what we have done from the tone of Colin’s wonderful books and hope very much he would have liked the film we have made.

My Week with Marilyn is directed by Simon Curtis and written by Adrian Hodges. It was released in the US and UK in November

I

Photo © Lawrence Schiller, All rights reserved

fairy story, an interlude, an episode out of time and space which nevertheless was real” is how Colin Clark describes his account of working on The Prince and the Showgirl. He published his first diary of his experiences, The Prince, the Showgirl and Me, in 1995 and in it he invites the reader to share his excitement as he gets closer and closer to the inner sanctum of the business and witnesses the complex process of a film being made. I loved the diary from the moment I first read it and was drawn both to the compelling detail of the making of a film in 1956 but also to the magical fantasy of a young man having an intimate relationship with Marilyn Monroe at the height of her powers on his very first job.

Since my first job was as an unpaid assistant director on a theatre production of Measure for Measure – during which I worked closely Lawrence Schiller is a writer, film producer and photo journalist and with its leading lady, Helen his book Marilyn and Me will be published by Taschen in 2012.

Mirren, running errands for her and helping her with her lines – I was familiar with the territory that Colin was in. Of course, this was no ordinary film. Marilyn Monroe had bought the rights to Terence Rattigan’s play The Sleeping Prince under the auspices of her newly formed production company. Marilyn was far ahead of her time in that way.

She hoped she could control her destiny by becoming a producer and looked evident right from the start, and Colin has a ringside forward to working with the great Olivier. He, in seat for it all. He is amazed to watch the struggle for turn, was not only prepared to work with her in place common ground between Marilyn, now devoted of his wife, Vivien Leigh, who had played the same to The Method (a way of acting in which actors part opposite him on stage, but hoped that working internalised, rather than simulated, the feelings of with the biggest movie star in the world would their character) and always accompanied by her rejuvenate his career. I believe he also hoped for a coach Paula Strasberg, and Olivier who believed in romance with Marilyn, but she arrived in London on a more external way of working. Rattigan’s play had the arm of her brand-new husband Arthur Miller, so worked on a West End stage, when it cashed in on that became unlikely. the excitement generated by the Queen’s coronation, It is hard not to see Olivier, then aged almost 50, but it was hardly bursting with cinematic potential. as emblematic of fading Britain and Marilyn, aged 30, Colin gets its right when he describes himself as the poster girl for brash, new America. 1956 was a telling Marilyn, in a remarkably bold and perceptive seminal year in English culture – the year of Look Back moment, “We are all trying to make a film which in Anger and Lucky Jim, the birth of rock’n’roll and absolutely should not be made.” commercial television. It was the moment England I was entranced by Colin’s first diary but it was the finally shook itself from under the shadow of World publication of the second, My Week with Marilyn, in War II. Unfortunately, The Sleeping Prince, for all its 2000 that convinced me that there was a film to be charm, belonged to the old theatrical tradition and, made by combining the two. In the second volume surprisingly for Marilyn, who wanted to break into Colin at last reveals his secret: during the making roles more challenging than ditzy blondes, her part of of the film, when Arthur Miller has left the country, Elsie is a giggly chorus girl. he and Marilyn have a remarkably intimate week The culture clash between these two icons is together. She finds herself able to trust Colin and, for

the first time in a life of romancing powerful older men, she is drawn to someone younger than she is.

Theirs is not a passionate sexual affair but an erotically charged connection of great intimacy. Colin longs to rescue her from her entourage and a life fuelled by pills and alcohol (“I desperately wanted to save her but what could I do?”), but it is enough for Marilyn that he is a trusted friend who listens and does not take advantage of her as men usually do.

For all my passion for the material, it was a long seven years before the first day of filming and we would never have got there at all without Michelle Williams and Ken Branagh committing to play Marilyn and Olivier. I still cannot believe my luck that two such magnificent actors were courageously prepared to take on these iconic roles. They both bring fierce intelligence and detail to all their performances and I learned from each of them every day.

Our production was based at Pinewood Studios where The Prince and the Showgirl had been made and, on her first day, Michelle was put in Marilyn’s old dressing room. We filmed on the same stage as they had and it was a magical moment to witness

THE ITALIAN JOBS

F

Actress Camilla Rutherford believes in the importance, and enjoyment, of being fully prepared for her roles – especially for Rome and her new part in The Borgias

or the second time since I have been working as an actress, I’ve wondered about my knowledge of Italian history. The first time was when I was working on the HBO/BBC production of Rome. This time it is because I have a role in Showtime’s series about, and called, The Borgias. Caesar is a good place to start to lead me to Savonarola. Readers of the FQR don’t need a history lesson from me – suffice to say quite a bit happened between the time of Cleopatra and the poison rings.

The history of the time in which a piece is set is important for three reasons. Firstly, it gives you information that will inform your role, in varying degrees and ways. Secondly, it makes everything from the clothes to the interpretation of the script more interesting. Thirdly, it is best not to come across as a bit of a dummy.

Despite that, knowing the history of the period is not always entirely necessary to the understanding of the motivations of your character. The loves and hates of human relationships, just as they are the same the world over, are timeless. Much is also done with poetic licence. In both Rome and The Borgias, I speak my boarding-school English, not Italian – or Latin, for that matter. Madonna’s movie W.E. was perhaps most interesting

Winter 2011

because she related to Wallis Simpson’s experience as a famous foreigner in England. Some accuracy is superfluous in the lucrative industry of entertainment. Does it matter if the music of Handel best conveys a scene set in the Renaissance? When I was working on Rome, I asked a fellow actor how much research she had done. She said her role was about a girl falling in love with the wrong man. Whatever omissions and deviations are

this time, Rome is constructed over the bridges of the Danube outside Budapest necessary in the telling of a story it is probably best to know the rules before breaking them, even if it is only not to give too bad an impression of our education system. I will do a masterclass in Italian history, however small the role. It will make the most of my upcoming experience.

Big sets are fun, a fantastic visualisation of the period. For Rome the city was constructed with stalls, cobbled streets and pillared mansions in the grounds of Cinecittà. We, the actors and the crew, hoped that Rome would go into a third series. The speculation became more intense as the shoot came to an end. The

7

physical position of your character in its last scene was the actor’s clue as to whether they would be back. If you were facing Rome, you were in luck. My character went to Egypt to live with the Pharaohs. But I knew she would miss the fashions and sophistications of Rome and return. Unfortunately, it was not to be. But it took that beautiful set being bulldozed to finally stop us hoping.

This time, Rome is constructed over the bridges of the Danube outside Budapest. My hair and clothes styled a different way, I will walk along Roman streets 1500 years later than before, or thereabouts, and 500 years ago. I hope this time that Rome will stay standing long enough for a lengthy stay in Budapest.

Camilla Rutherford is an actress and model who has just completed filming Dimensions, directed by Sloane U’Ren, which is about a young boy whose encounter with a professor results in a fascination with the theory of bending time.

www.finchsquarterly.com

´

, AME N Y B E TUR ERGE A B rk N A F é’s wo nate, S BY aberg indiscrimi U F l is is r O a UL ng C ho, if he is burned. Th i y B u A b F or rw ers Tips f llecto es in. s fing

co ry of hi 10 om ’s Top buy the easily have list dealer c ery catego that is n n u e ia ev can y to rey M pertis s in e spec eces Geoff remost, tr ergé so ere th list dealer gacy of ex tock of pi om h w b o f a r s e a ade F ying f t and have ve a l ave a Speci 1. Firs that has mobjects that They 7. ks of art ha imes they h ately, and bu at uniquely ? th et or riv ork y. em he the w ese are t of Fantas flower w erless. Som acquired p f acquiring y from th the Th u e s o n . t b p e d s m c e n ave be chanc st more to comes fro famou bbed Obje animal a hey are that h the only t e u n d , o s it co d value t d n s s i n e but be hard me frie em Does . h . s e t e s adde henticity. ramount h c e t l e i e e o s e p s e h l u t d l a t a a u y e c p more s au nd lik erl eci incl and, ing but utt Lilliputian that sp always, a dition and ticity are , we know , once s e i a stud ly charm on a t follows le Not tee of con d authen Ironically Russi s, the ork is an him. lete o. d sib ran l, i comp abergé’s w s beautifu r is permis ans gua ondition portant to are from inst all od ible to F a i a e e C g m l e ss i l w a r l m o w a . , a r 2. C when sm ng. A little ed enamel r the 8 venance is the furthe pen. There times it is p nventory o i r i e o f o e r o h é s t s t m y p g tt e , i l y and Faber erfect fit on and so o. Sha cking w wid s ever tion i e is a no-n ul piece is about osed, is no e survived iece by che not only p perial c e f r e n f s v g l p i p a uti tter a lam-c the Im rds ha bject y to a al dam ly bea you u e you c perial reco ling histor m. If the o llection of an and its but re ce perfect . d i D r z e o a Im ec alism daz t th on or ard on! add a ber agains lso from th short of a t that a knacker’s y first reacti the piece ? The acid are r be ng gé aw num iful but a if you tor. nothi l. f Faber ember you you first s it ought to asion. If t l s i e u s a t r i e u b c ir n m inves agica , then sk yo 3. Re le sigh whe r, for love affa than one oc is your family is almost m buying, a ard-headed superb e , i b r i x a a r e o bo inaud his love aff ece on m powe en you ar lector or h ays been ds? wood pen it? It i y t l l l p h re hol he g w l o o e u n c a t h W h o t u . a d s f u t a e 9 i o forci e s h is y h lin so a with t hat th ergé to rev elveta touc y time doing st of Fab knows w o perform es, you test is s original v h and ever rprise and , it is t e y ho it ac su air The b ent but w s not prove eauty is… melled it is in the same e of delight, a love aff a b e m n t f o . ail ike on inves Fabergé d a thing o ower, an e always reacti be a cockt ot, then, l it’s too late k for fl ll n r i e u A w h n to f re oo gé If yo tfolios, t y forever. ought -hot lust. I ng out befo time to l ry to Faber ficate. r y o o j b p a l e t i T ’s e i it tt it ! bes g jew sheer s cert ed it… e of wh y worth ge ase then ound guess scintillatin hless share define the has c l e reb for you. Th e b h e v a t a h b t h t o n y at tl o pr as or it the t o a quie ner of a w let us try t mple of wh spun that w e, but no really does rs will fit r o f I x s . o w a 4 b x o ct e, om ale at her to the s talk don bergé, an e rt, an obje utiful elsew Fabergé th ecialist de . The salero uyer, t r o f A a u m love p b F ea r o es o rt and s tious less antag nothe be a c th the seri a piece by ing of Cou II and his b ngely i a find a salerooms e their adv e the incau avoided un r s g s av 10. W re of ownin he last flowe sar Nichola of these str ation e tic w famou h sources h low to en es are to b e t o i T u g r as ag n th ed ea eas at es ot ht to ng a pl n described f the ill-fat s not in th creative im tion he g i r bill. B eir estimat famous est e i i b y to ec bee th of bu magic he restless ch of perf joyful t can e orbi pitch t sales from bject. mes i e chance seum once t t t of th ndra. The i i t tty u p e e l o n r l i o u l m p i c th shr lexa ects but Mu y no of life so ese its n l and e y A h u d r s r of the h Th i e t e n f t . w a v i i s w t rt Br yi ly obj men n the time of the s c ft d i a t n r mone very aspec d, but on ctor of the work of a ’s work, o a c a ous hypn olent n é ury, i ergé e e 5. In n to the wi rs. A late dir ip between st of Faberg ery time of Carl Fab f his numer e 20th cent hey are red luxury o h th le tt cautio piece is you o relations the very be ach and ev ition. If anded re made in or car, bu nimaginab m e t e d r n r e t e e u e t o p s o f s f w m u o m e s h a o t u mas at there i c e c i c e t r is be nly t o sna conce ne and th ote, an ag h nd of m said t ut this is o eless. That a whirlwi rm to try t do so. o of ore re c s b n eleph o i t e e rector ue i value is truly pr e it inspir e of the s reach, th tion of t mething m orever.

D g l r y f iq c o gin which ered for sa go to the e out of you but a colle rever. s t and gone n is Mana irm of ant 65 f s ff s o s 8 l f o n o o e t a d 1 l s u r c e s t i i d s n n n p r i M a it o ales that la as it s é, ily-ow travag offrey an aff luable you c ue treasure ets one’s ex nt reproach sk. All va é is Ge tski, a fam in North W arl Faberg a g r q r e C d r i l g i a e e u f n e s b o d o r u W a a y n a work ellery rgé is ity?” ch and F eldom rs fou One s d-rate Fabe f authentic nd faked, far too mu e deale ising in the rt, fine jew a , o l a h n f ns d tt seco nd what specia copie orks o é”, bu t reaso 6. “A ks of art are For prurien t “Fauxberg rical value Russian w. n. ou er . sto wor d silv en ab art-hi m ceptio books no ex been writt es has no he sale of ss of an .wartski.co t w e ak g n w f e n has w i r f s a o a study yond incre eless, an aw rucial to be th e is c n o N fakes

FQR Christmas Gift Guide: Vintage Cartier and Fabergé

3780 Gstaad - Switzerland Phone: +41 33 748 50 00 - Fax: +41 33 748 50 01 info@palace.ch - www.palace.ch

Winter 2011

C

artier was established in 1847, proclaiming its business as “Jeweller, Gold & Silversmith & Purveyor of Novelties”. The common denominator of these trades was the jewellery-making skill of its founder Louis-François Cartier, craftsman and former apprentice of the master jeweller Maître Adolphe Picard. The “novelties” side of the business came together easily: myriad objects and accessories, in a sweeping quest for e x cel l en ce, were held to the same standards as jewellerymaking.

Although pocket watches and chatelaines first appeared in Cartier windows in 1853, at its then location in rue Neuvedes-Petits-Champs in Paris, it was not until the turn of the century that table clocks would make their début when, in 1898, at the age of 23, the founder’s grandson, Louis Cartier, joined the house then headed by his father, Alfred.

As with jewellery, the first clocks created by the newly established design studio showcased the style preferences of the eldest Cartier son. At the time, Art Nouveau was king in the world of decorative arts, exerting absolute authority over style, from architecture to furniture, fabric to jewels, and porcelain to gold and silverwork. Louis Cartier chose to eschew the predominant style. As with jewellery, order was restored as the first pieces saw a return to classicism.

In an outpouring of urns, fluted columns, pyramids, bollards, consoles, obelisks and Greek friezes, rais de cœur and garland motifs, it was as though classical architecture had declared war on the leafy invader that threatened to suffocate it. Cartier seized the opportunity to engage the exceptional artistry of the finest enamellers in the world, Russian and later French craftsmen, and to challenge Carl Fabergé on home turf in the wake of his spectacular impact at the Paris World Expo in 1900.

These pieces saw the emergence of the key elements that were to form the trademark Cartier style: proportion, volume, balance, association of bold colours and, most importantly, the soon-to-emerge sense for the understated, pared-down and absence of excess. Motifs were almost stylised out of existence, or reduced to a mere punctuation of cabochon gemstones;

Magic in the Mountains...

137x215_FQR_X-ready 1

The house of Cartier is built on skill, excellence, quality and imagination, all of which, says Pierre Rainero, underpin its trademark exquisite style

25.10.11 08:00

9

ultimately, the play was restricted to volumes, geometry, materials and colour.

The 1910s sparkled with onyx, diamonds and rock crystal, with pastel enamel making an occasional appearance.

It is useful at this point to note that the inspired craftsman Maurice C o u ë t began to work exclusively with Cartier from 1911. The youngest generation of a strong French watchmaking line – his grandfather worked at Breguet, while his father had his own studio – he himself honed his own skills at Prévost. Thus, Louis Cartier, Maurice Couët and a close inner circle of designers, including Charles Jacqueau, pooled their talents and went on to create true masterpieces.

The heroines of this adventure – the famous mystery clocks – made their début with “Model A” in 1912. The mechanical performance and the pure, pared-down style of the bare, transparent clock faces opened these pieces to a full range of artistic interpretations. Masterpieces of delicacy, the mystery clocks are the epitome of the art of Cartier watchmaking. y the 1920s, the house could well have rested on its laurels for having heralded the style moderne – only much later known as Art Deco – 20 years before anyone else. Cartier instead chose to immerse itself in other cultures in order to come up with innovative new items, with a degree of boldness that still surprises today. A dazzling flood of ideas was inspired by Egypt, China, India, Japan and Islamic art.

The antiquities were taken as a point of departure for a piece, and chimeras, dragons, carp, elephants, turtles, Chinese guardian lions and Billikens were the order of the day. A wealth of colours and materials contrasted, merged and co-ordinated: motherof-pearl, coral, lapis lazuli, agate, rock crystal, citrine, yellow gold, kingfisher feathers, onyx and enamel – and this list, albeit lengthy, always reserved the right to an ultimate diamond-studded flourish.

The fruits of this creativity enjoyed sensational success among collectors the world over. From Europe to America, and across the planet from east to west and north to south, a Cartier clock became, and remains, a sign of universal good taste.

Pierre Rainero has been the Strategy and Heritage Director of the House of Cartier since 2003; www.cartier.com

B

Clockwise from top right: Carp clock with retrograde hand 1925, Egyptian Striking Clock 1927, Clock 1941, Obelisk Clock 1908, Screen Clock 1926

finchsquarterly.com

© Nick Welsh, Cartier Collection

a il cockta t, gh of deli and se surpri h of a touc hot whitelust

FQR Christmas Gift Guide: Craft Special

BennEy and the Jets

Artist Paul Benney writes about his father – the late, celebrated gold- and silversmith Gerald – and his influence on his own work and life

M

y father didn’t die; he became an idea. In contemplating what he meant to me for this article I can only give an emerging impression of the idea he is becoming to me. It will take years of replaying the home movies in my head before the fully realised, and probably completely fictional, Gerald Benney appears.

Starting with the end. I was privileged to be able to sit with my father in the morgue the day after he died for at least two hours and completed a drawing of him lying at rest. Apart from the strangeness of it all – the odd and never to be forgotten smell, vaguely comforting then (but now if I catch a whiff of anything remotely similar it sends me straight back to that place) – it was the complete silence of a dead person, the absence of the faintest sound of breath almost bruising in its stubborn resistance to my ministrations of love and small regrets, that remains with me. I was struck by the frigidity of his skin as I leaned over to kiss his forehead, and the smallness of his stature, particularly his skull, that was in such contrast to his enormous presence in life. The drawing became, as I worked, an elegy from me to him. The tenderness I felt towards a father who, in most respects, exceeded what was expected of him. You see, I’m doing it already.

From the day he thought I was old enough to warrant this kind of knowledge, I received by osmosis what were to become the most important social and practical skills of my later life. I would watch over his shoulder as he sat at his desk in the workshops at home in Beenham. I saw his insistence on attention to detail, his ambitious imagination and his determination

to carry an idea through to its realisation. These were all qualities implicit in the work. It was a continual challenge in those days to live up to the standards he set for himself and the silversmiths employed to carry out his designs. But gradually I saw the benefits of such rigour.

He had an enormous following of committed patrons, but what I was most affected by was his ability to make friends out of collectors and collectors out of friends. There never seemed to be a distinction between the two. This collector/friend relationship facilitated a great artist to realise something new and wondrous.

I was privileged to be able to sit with my father in the morgue the day after he died Two pieces, one a major commission, the other a more modest but revealing masterpiece, sum up his work and working practice for me. The dramatic, elegant rose bowl commissioned by the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths has the two elements that most clearly exemplify his vision: a clear, bold and unusual design, coupled with a finish and level of workmanship that came to be his trademark. The enamelling was pristine and a technique that only the greatest craftsmen, such as Fabergé, ever mastered. The other is the goblet that he made for my mother on being presented with his first-born. It is an emu egg lined with a gold inner cup and fixed through the bottom onto a gilt stem and given a Benney burned and melted finish. As the first born, I always had a special affection for this

piece of my father’s work. It has all the charm of the one-off, is surprising, and yet a classic of its time. As Francis Bacon wrote nearly four centuries before, “There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.”

My father seemed to particularly enjoy the process of designing for an individual. These personal pieces, such as the jade tree for Sarah McAlpine, the jewelencrusted stirrup cup for Alistair McAlpine, and the tea and coffee set made for Harry Oppenheimer, were all inspired pieces.

He has set the bar for modern silverware very high and I feel relieved not to have trodden in his footsteps. My brother Simon, however, has pulled off this feat with great aplomb with a brave departure from the much-loved Benney designs to a singular personal style of his own.

Like all perfectionists, my father was often frustrated by both the limitations of his materials and with the way in which his work and the work of other leading craftsmen was perceived. Perhaps now, were he to see the shift in the public’s appreciation of craft and design and the work of the V&A, the Design Museum and the many other cultural institutions that have made significant additions to their collections of his and others’ work in the field of design and manufacture, he could look on with some pride.

Paul Benney is currently the Artist-in-Residence at Somerset House. His work is included in many public and private collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the National Portrait Gallery in London. He is preparing for a major one-man exhibition at Somerset House in October 2012; www.paulbenney.com

Courtesy of Linley

Socking It To ’Em A pair of shooting socks made on an old-fashioned handloom brings as much joy to the maker as to the wearer, says Emma Willis

T

Master Craftsman At Work

It all started with a box of pencils… And now Jamie Edmiston is running luxury furniture, accessories and interior-design company Linley alongside its eponymous founder

I

first became aware of Linley as a teenager when my mother gave me a Linley Christmas present. At the time I was unaware of the brand but had noticed the distinctive but blue-ribboned box sitting beneath the tree. I was intrigued. Then, after elaborate ribbon untying and peeling back of tissue paper – lo and behold, a mere box of pencils. This could have been a slight anticlimax; however, these were no ordinary pencils. They were most definitely superior to any other pencil I had seen before – beautifully crafted and finished, almost too good to be used.

Perhaps that is the thing about Linley – even the smallest, most pedestrian of everyday items can be elevated to something precious when they are exquisitely crafted. I still have the box, although the pencils have in fact long since been used. It sits on a shelf as a poignant reminder of Linley past as I focus on Linley the future – for earlier this year, I became a shareholder of the brand and am now running the business alongside David Linley himself.

How did this come to pass? I spent 10 years in the yachting industry working alongside others to establish Edmiston as the world leader in its sector. Prior to this, I had a background in branding, contributing to the development of iconic names, which ranged from Red Bull to Veuve Clicquot. As I became increasingly immersed in the luxury-goods sector, I began to question what defined luxury and what made some brands stand out from others.

Spending time at the Monaco Yacht Show, I got to know David Linley, who founded his eponymous company in 1985. We discussed the importance of craftsmanship in a world of mass production, and I admired David’s

passion and commitment to his trade. David was himself trained as a cabinetmaker and has devoted much of his career to encouraging others to learn the skills, the results of which are some of the most beautiful pieces of furniture you can buy in this country, and in the world, today. David is a perfectionist with the mind of an engineer – attributes that I admire greatly.

He has applied this in all that he has done with the brand to date, and created the kernel of a fantastic global opportunity. For this reason, when David approached me earlier in the year, I leapt at the opportunity of becoming involved with the brand on a personal basis, combining this with the work I continue to do at Edmiston.

It struck me that Linley shares much of the DNA of some of the most established luxury brands we see around us today – the likes of Vuitton, Hermès and Cartier.

They have bespoke craftsmanship and skill at their heart and have evolved to become synonymous with exclusivity and excellence. But they have taken a century to come to fruition, whereas Linley is a mere 26 years old. Our challenge is to marry great design with craftsmanship and to develop the brand without losing any of its individuality.

For I believe individuality is crucial in a frenetic world of mass consumerism, where most things can be bought and can certainly be emulated. However, it is not possible to mass-produce items that have been meticulously designed and hand-crafted and which therefore display the true hallmarks of human endeavour and excellence. Linley’s aim is to create the unique, the exceptional and the distinctive.

Jamie Edmiston a Director of the renowned yacht charter firm Edmiston and Company and CEO of Linley

spending time at the Monaco Yacht Show, I got to know David Linley

www.finchsquarterly.com

en years ago I was visited at my shop by Eileen Coxon, a Suffolk painter, who had taught herself to make walking socks on a hand-operated Victorian sock loom, which she had fallen in love with at an antiques fair. She had read about us, and how we sold specialist English-made products, and thought our shop would be the ideal outlet for her socks.

With her artist’s eye for colour and her love of nature, she chose stunning coloured cashwool merino wool yarn, giving the shades names such as Harebell, Redcurrant, Hickory, Mallow… and knitted us hundreds of pairs of beautifully made socks over the years. Our customers in Jermyn Street loved them, enjoying the story of the time, care, patience and pleasure that went into each sock, maintaining a dying skill. The fine yarn and weave create an extremely comfortable and flattering ribbed knee-high sock.

The socks make great shootingweekend presents – a matching pair for the host and hostess – as I gave to Charlotte and James Townshend, Charles and Sam Stopford-Sackville and Caroline and James Dean.

Kate Moss fell for them in our shop window, and she was the only person I let actually try them on!

Eileen wrote to me a few months ago to say that she was sadly unable to continue making socks for us on a big scale, and kindly offered to train one of the machinists and hand-sewers at our Gloucester factory.

Lyn Gallager, one of our skilled bespokeshirt machinists, embroiderers and hand-sewers, rose to the challenge, and spent two days in Suffolk with Eileen in her rural self-sufficient paradise. They worked patiently together, from 7am till 9pm, taking breaks to eat Eileen’s delicious home-produced eggs, vegetables and fruit. Lyn even slept in the same room as the loom, telling me how she would be glad that even while she slept she would be absorbing its secrets! Having not met before, the two ladies very much enjoyed each other’s company, as true craftswomen with inordinate amounts of skill, patience and passion for handwork would.

Lyn is now set up in her Sock Room at our Gloucester factory, with the Griswold Victorian sock loom (Griswold became the generic name for the sock machine as the

Griswold cast iron used to make them produced the sturdiest and most popular looms), attached to a table, under the strong daylight of a large window – necessary for such detailed work. It is a circular machine, with a round of needles. One of every seven needles is removed to create the rib, and replaced at the ankle where the ribbing ends. I was surprised and pleased to find that I can buy replacements from a company in Leicester.

As it has such intricate needles that need to be kept very clean, Lyn has made covers for the two parts, and embroidered them with “EW”. That is the sort of detail that I find so inspiring.

The socks are knitted using three ends of yarn together (four strands at the heel and the toe); therefore we order three 5,000-metre cones of each colour. They are hand-grafted with the wool, hence seamfree.

The grafting mimics the knitted stitches that the sock machine makes, so the join is invisible and without the discomfort of a seam – ideal for walking many miles.

I have ordered £3,000-worth of beautiful coloured cashwool merino wool from Italy, with matching polyester thread from Ireland, used to reinforce the toe and the heel for longer wear. We will keep the wool in airtight bags to keep its moisture, and in a cupboard to prevent any fading from sunlight.

I’ve bought additional colours, which, using Eileen’s names for inspiration, we have enjoyed giving new monikers.

In August we began knitting our own socks for this winter, with thanks to Eileen’s inspiration and her and Lyn’s patience and skill. I think it is so heartening that there are still, and I believe always will be, talented craftsmen and women who enjoy and take pleasure in passing on these great traditions. Lyn will teach others to operate the loom in a few months, when we have finished making the winter stock. It is very hopeful for British manufacturing, as I believe there will always be a demand and appreciation for having things made for oneself which have clearly taken so much love and attention.

Emma Willis is a renowned shirtmaker in London. Her hand-knitted shooting socks come in a range of colours: Havannah, Hickory, Cosmos, Lavender, Fuchsia, Cherry, Raspberry, Mallow, Harebell, Teal, Ceramic, Celeste, Spring, Apple, Sand, Paprika. Emma Willis, 66 Jermyn Street, London SW1; www.emmawillis.com.

Kate Moss fell for them in our shop window

10

Winter 2011

Celebrated glass engraver Philip Lawson Johnston has a Royal Warrant – and an encouraging story for anyone who’s a bit of a drifter

Whether working in yew, rosewood or holly, the celebrated furniture maker John Makepeace OBE maintains a sense of discovery and delight in his craft, which is redolent in his aweinspiring work

I

suppose one is a rebel in choosing a career as a furniture maker. It was contrary to all common sense and advice at the time. There was no prospect when I started training. The principal said I’d better qualify as a teacher so I’d got something when I failed as a designer. But I persevered and began to create work that one doesn’t normally associate with 20th-century furniture. I introduced the element of craft and individuality to furniture,

A Glass Act somewhat lackadaisical nature, it took me about three months of constant prodding by her (I wouldn’t say “nagging”, as she was far too nice for that!) to get me to do something about it. When I eventually went to visit another engraver accompanied by my older brother, Andy, who was in the same rather directionless state as myself, we both came away enthused and determined to give it a go. We started to teach ourselves with a shared second-hand dentist drill, and before too long it became apparent that this could develop into something more than just a hobby.

Helped to begin with by kind family and friends, I gradually began to make some sort of living from glass engraving and, within a year, I found myself setting up a workshop in London’s Earl’s Court in a shop

rather than the conventions of machine production that now envelop so much design and, in fact, compromise individual craftsmanship.

When I first started out, I found it hard to find a place to learn about furniture design and craftsmanship. That got me thinking about the need for a place to train furniture craftsmen. As a result, I bought Parnham House in Dorset in 1976 and set up a college, which was alongside my own furniture studio. Buying this house – a huge, historic, redundant building – and giving it a contemporary purpose was very thrilling but really quite mad at the time during the 1973-76 recession.

The college grew and from the second year, students were coming from abroad. There was the college,

my studio with 10 craftsmen, and the house. We organised a programme of lectures and exhibitions, and the whole thing had a very open feeling, allowing students the ability to explore new ways of creating. As a result, there was an amazing energy to it. Parnham was incredibly significant – it was 25 years and an extraordinary and very special chapter in my life.

Looking back, what’s been exceptionally important for me in my career is having a sense of discovery in my craft and the ability to share this and to learn from other disciplines and specialists such as structural engineers and material scientists, which I have been very fortunate to have done.

My Favourite Five pieces:

1. I created the Mitre Chair when we were still using exotic woods. Making it involved designs and methods of design that were unprecedented at that time. I used a combination of ebony and nickel silver, which seemed to go very well together. Ebony is a very luxurious material. The form was to go with the chess set, in which all the pieces were made in the form of the bishop’s mitre. It was made to celebrate the Queen and Prince Philip’s 25th wedding anniversary.

2. For the Trine Chair I wanted to reduce the number of components in it down to three legs, a seat and the back. The seat is incredibly strong because of the layering of two different woods: 5,000-year-old bog oak and yew wood. These are trees that fell down 5,000 years ago in a storm and farmers have dug them up. What was important to me was achieving what I call a “high-tech” performance from wood. Normally, wood furniture is heavy and clumsy and not very strong at the joints. Here we developed technology using stainless steel and epoxy resin, a method developed at Nasa by their structural engineers, and not previously used in furniture.

3. The Millennium Chair is made in holly. I’m intrigued by holly, because when you see a medieval chest made with inlays of it, it’s still its natural colour – it hasn’t darkened. I love the idea of having a wood that retains its paleness. Originally, I was commissioned by a Yorkshireman to make a pair in rosewood. We were just making the jigs, because this is quite elaborate laminating, some of the pieces have 40 layers, and I rang him up and asked if he minded if we made a second pair. I said we’d use something very different from the rosewood, like holly, and he asked if he could choose which pair when we’d made them both. His budget was £15,000 for the pair of chairs. The rosewood pair were on show in the house and, typically, somebody came along, saw them and asked if we could persuade the client to maybe take the holly pair as he was prepared to pay £75,000 for the rosewood ones. When my client from Yorkshire came to see the rosewood pair, I explained the story and he said, “It’s all quite simple… the holly pair are worth £100,000.” Clever blighter. It was such an educational experience to realise that something could be worth a lot more than it cost the maker, and it confirmed that I was on the right track.

I contacted some of the best antiques dealers and was invited to exhibit in America, and in the first exhibition two gentlemen came up to me and said, “I represent the Art Institute in Chicago” and “I’m from the Lewis Collection in Richmond, Virginia”. They bought the pair between them. This was one of my great lessons in craftsmanship: who’s to say what something is worth?

4. The Zebra Pair of Cabinets. Light and shade can also be created by marquetry, using two woods, one light one dark. For example, in the Zebra pair of cabinets I used holly and black oak. That is absolutely natural, and you’d struggle to find a place to put a pin between the joints.

We use a laser-cutting program on a computer to achieve a perfect cut. As a result, you get a change in texture. The holly is very dense and the oak very open-pored. It’s a lovely, tactile quality. For me, so many skills have been lost, and marquetry has so far been used mostly today as puny statements. So to make a whole piece about marquetry is about enriching the language of furniture and to protect the skills we have but which craftsmen are neglecting.

5. The Sylvan chairs. A chair is so much a part of our being that it needs to be organic, despite the convention of machine-made things, which are geometric. It needs to be organic and a reflection of the body’s needs. For me, the body creates interesting shapes and forms. I suppose that, in a way, nature is the best possible designer; it learns through evolution and there is so much we can learn from that. It’s efficient, it’s economical and it’s beautiful. It’s about trying to be sensitive to those things. That’s the pleasure one has working directly with people. You try to produce something they could never have expected.

John Makepeace was awarded an OBE in 1988 for services to furniture design and in 2002 received the American Furniture Society’s Award of Distinction. He was a founding member of the Crafts Council in the UK and a Trustee of the V&A, London. Early commissions from Templeton and Keble College, Oxford, Liberty and the Banque Générale du Luxembourg, were followed by major museums, and corporate and private collections around the world.

Winter 2011

11

© John Makepeace OBE

Gerald Benney Gol © Graham Hughes - from the bench The story of fifty years at

dsmith:

G

lass engraving has been my primary occupation now for more than 40 years. In the early days, it was practising the art (or is it a craft – or both?) on milk bottles, jam jars and any spare pieces of glass that I could “borrow” off my parents, whereas now it is anything from the simplest goblet, vase or bowl to table top, door or church window.

Over the years, I have managed to develop a style that is my own, using a hand-held drill and working under a small stream of running water. This is to keep the glass clean and cool. As a large proportion of my work is commissioned, I have spent many, sometimes challenging, hours trying to decipher people’s desires and design preferences for their special pieces. At the time I started, I was largely ignorant of the history of glass engraving; that it has been traced back approximately 3,500 years to Mesopotamia, through the Roman era, and then flourishing at certain times and places and dying out during other periods. It was most recently revived in 1935, principally by the legendary Sir Laurence Whistler.

I wasn’t particularly interested in glass when I was contemplating what occupation might suit me best. I was one of those teenagers who had no idea what to do with their life, although I thought that something in the art line would probably be the only option as it was basically the one thing I imagined I might be good at. This was partly because I had not distinguished myself in any other subject. However, this was made somewhat more complicated by the fact that I managed to fail my art A-level!

I gathered up my hurt pride and drifted with no particular purpose or direction. It was then that my mother, as mothers do, stepped in and suggested that I might look into glass engraving as a possible answer. Being of a

called Living Art, while my brother had started engraving in the glass department of Harrods. Later, I joined him at a shop he had set up in Knightsbridge, called Andrew Glass Engraving, where we worked together for a period of years. When he moved to Aberdeenshire we went our separate ways.

For the next few years, I had a workshop at the Plazzotta sculpture showroom in Chelsea, which housed the works of Enzo Plazzotta. Throughout this time, my brother and I often had long phone conversations comparing engraving notes and discoveries as well as our growing faith, which enabled us to develop a unique and special relationship. From about 1990, we came together for an annual exhibition in London, which we shared for about 15 years with our two other, older brothers – Arthur, an art dealer, and Harry, a water-colourist. When Andy sadly died in 2006 it was felt that we shouldn’t continue the family exhibition without him.

Since then, I have been exhibiting annually at Patrick Mavros on the Fulham Road, where I have been able to show my glass alongside the exceptional silver animals and birds designed by Patrick and cast in Zimbabwe. I have sought to reflect their primarily African themes in my engravings, often creating displays with, for example, glass pieces with elephant engravings surrounded by silver elephants. The association with Patrick Mavros has continued to the present day with successful annual exhibitions, and currently there is a permanent display of my engraved glass in their shop.

In January 2009, I had the honour of being given a Royal Warrant to be hand engraver to Her Majesty the Queen and I am currently an Associate Fellow of the Guild of Glass Engravers.

While I have to regard glass engraving much of the time as a job to be done, I hope to create on glass designs that not only are pleasing to the eye and accurate in what they portray, but also reflect in some way the care and attention to detail of the Creator, as observed in the world around us.

Philip Lawson Johnston has exhibited in London (at Patrick Mavros, Holland & Holland, The General Trading Company and Paisley Tyler), at the Wykeham Gallery, Stockbridge and the Hackwood Arts Festival in Hampshire as well as at the Foxhall Gallery in Washington DC

Photo by Philip Lawson Johnston

FQR Christmas Gift Guide: Craft Special

www.finchsquarterly.com

E FQR xclusive Dou offer: a sp blin e cia 2 inc g Cu h do lly com be

m u neer bling cu issione inlai ed in sh be prec d iny isi To o d luxu r y le metal on rder tom please ather. £ with @fin cont 75. ac ch or te squar te t Tom a +44 lephon rly.com t e (0)2 0 78 on 51 71 40 engi

FQR Backgammon and Missing Mark Birley

Geoffrey Parker is the big name in luxe backgammon boards – and it’s not just his son, Max Parker, who thinks there’s no real competition

W

ay back in 1961, when my father, Geoffrey, was asked by the then chairman of Alfred Dunhill, Richard Dunhill, “Can you make a chessboard, Geoffrey?” – following the first three years of our existence binding miniature literary classics of Shakespeare and British poets – little did we know that within a small amount of time we would become the leaders in luxury gaming.

The ancient art of inlaying leather was at the very heart of making a chessboard. This precise work fitted well with the exacting skills of our workshop of bookbinders, who were used to intricate and delicate projects. Once this new skill was mastered, the obvious bedfellow to chess was the even more ancient game of backgammon.

The all-time classic World Chess Championship final in 1972 between the American Bobby Fischer and the up to then almost unbeatable Soviet Boris Spassky – in what many believe to be the finest series of matches ever played, and even more heightened due to the Cold War atmosphere at the time – saw Geoffrey Parker’s workshops supplying the caskets and chessboard for this iconic pairing.

And our backgammon designs were not far behind, quickly becoming the hallmark of the

playboy “player”.

Sailing from Southampton to New York City for a week, the world’s finest players boarded the venerable QE2 to contest the World Backgammon Championship in 1975 amongst fragrant clouds of tobacco smoke, the heady aroma of hard liquor and the intoxicating

production plants pumped out black, red and green PVC and felt “Gucci” clones, we made the real thing for the luxury house – one of the few non-Italian producers, we believe, in its history.

Our trays of copper and brass embossing dyes looked like a “who’s who” of luxury brands from Paris

Chairman Of The Board perfume of the jet set, and 20 competition Geoffrey Parker boards were commissioned to mark the occasion.

Geoffrey Parker’s backgammon boards became de rigueur amongst the rich, famous and champions alike – Harrods was requesting as many as could be produced per week, regardless of colour, shape and size. Backgammon was as red hot as a sizzling Ferrari or a glowing Cohiba – although nestling within the converted piggeries that still comprise the workshops of this niche manufacturer could not be further from the heady life of the gaming clubs of Mayfair and Monte Carlo.

Requests flooded in from all over the globe, some seemingly strange, such as the building of a “blind” backgammon board for a client. After months of work to ensure the board looked as normal as possible but had inherent subtle differences that the non-sighted player would immediately pick up on, it was revealed that the special order was from the American singing great Stevie Wonder.

As the rest of the world caught on and mass-

to London, New York to Hong Kong.

Even such modes of transport as the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express luxury train requested miniature travel versions of Geoffrey Parker’s larger classics for its discerning clientele.

Expertise was always central to the production of these exquisite pieces, not only from the experienced hands of our craftsmen, but from those who excel at the game.

Probably still regarded today as the greatest living champion and expert of the game, Paul Magriel – a onetime mathematics professor and a player so good that he had to stop playing for a while because there were few games on level terms to be had – was consulted and helped to develop our famed weighted leather stone or checker. Taking great precision and dexterity, a papier-mâché former is made from layering board and glue into which a lead weight is inserted while two leather discs are carefully positioned to form a top and bottom.

Then taking a special angled knife, a leather strip is pared away to form an almost paper-thin feathered

the intoxicating perfume of the jet set

edge, which no machine can achieve. This is carefully adhered to the edge and then burnished to an almost invisible join to create the ultimate playing piece – fast and a delight in the hand. As FQR’s esteemed editor in chief Nicholas Foulkes once said when seeing a set of bright-orange leather stones about to leave the workshop, “If Hermès ever made hockey pucks, this is what they would look like!”

Later, a European champion helped to introduce precision dice to our design, together with trips within the dice cups to prevent unfair play. On visits to our casino, it was noted that during furious battles members were crushing the dice cups – so an uncrushable design was made. iant inlaid leather doubling cubes became a Geoffrey Parker trait and, as the shakers (and movers) of the world’s business élite became keen players, the demand for even more exotic sets became a frequent request. One such, for a business mogul’s private jet, became something of a standard bearer: in alligator, it was set with 18ct white-gold fittings, inlaid to the inside with shagreen with diamonds set within the solid-gold stones and even as the spots of the dice and the numbers on the doubling cube.

The first televised World final in 2005 was filmed in Monaco on a “GP” board, and today, Geoffrey Parker remains at the top of the backgammon world.

Innovation still comes from deep in the Essex countryside – for example, a beach backgammon board which rolls up with hard-sides for professional play.

When design comes from practicality, elegance and employing the best hands and materials in the business, one can sleep soundly in the knowledge of a job well done.

Max Q Parker is the Chairman & Designer of Geoffrey Parker Games; www.geoffreyparker.com

G

Missing Mark

Tel +44 207 930 8606

‘Five Stone’ Cuffs by VERDURA

www.finchsquarterly.com

12

A

Mar g g Mar

in is isssin MM

I

irll Bir kkB

www.harryfane.com

illness, he lost his taste for all alcohol, which had been one of the great pleasures of his life, along with a really good cigar.

I always felt a nagging sense of guilt when it was time to go; as I kissed him goodbye, he had a wistful look in his eye and I knew that he wanted me to stay longer. I never felt I spent long enough with him, but I lived in Richmond, and there were grandchildren to be picked up from school and always appalling traffic on the roads. part from his endless teasing, to which I had been subjected all my married life, there was that intense loyalty and sweetness shown the moment I was in any kind of trouble. The Westminster Hospital was slightly baffled when it was Mark who took me in as I was about to give birth to Jemima, my first child by Jimmy Goldsmith, and even more so when, on leaving my room, he reappeared wearing a doctor’s white coat plus a stethoscope which he had found in a cupboard – all done to make me laugh.

It was Mark who cried with me when any of my dogs died and who would spend hours discussing the funeral plans and what to inscribe on the headstone.

I miss that drawling voice, sometimes full of laughter, sometimes cross, and those roars of laughter at a dirty joke. He had the best sense of humour in the world, and I have endless letters from him full of imagined incidents concerning our dogs, even to the extent of them robbing banks and being arrested; in one case, my Dachshund, Midge, committed a murder and was taken away in a Black Maria.

All his friends must miss Mark, but I feel as if I have lost my best friend. We may have been divorced, but we remained the best of friends – a very loving friendship, unequalled today.

Lady Annabel Goldsmith’s latest book, No Invitation Required: The Pelham Cottage Years, is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson (2009)

y •• ey e

I

have written so often of Mark Birley, both in books and articles, that it is quite hard to find something new to write about him. I have previously written about his immaculate taste, his sartorial elegance, his loyalty, his perfectionism, his flashes of bad temper and, last but not least, I wrote a whole chapter in my last book about his deep love of dogs, a side of his character with which I felt people would be less familiar. On reflection, for this article, I decided that my best option would be to try and describe the things I miss most about him.

First, the acerbic wit thrown at one, usually rather unexpectedly, but that never failed to make me laugh, an example of which would go as follows. After Mark’s illness, which confined him to his house, I would make as many regular visits as I could, sometimes to have lunch and sometimes to talk and reminisce; he loved reminiscing.

Rather than sleep in his bed, he had taken to spending all day lying on a reclining chair, and at night would refuse to leave it, preferring to sleep on it. I remonstrated with him, reminding him that he had a brand-new Tempur mattress on his bed – but to no avail. The only occupant of the bed was George the Labrador, who spent all day on it.

On my visits, the most comfortable place to plonk myself on was the bed and, as I climbed onto it, Mark invariably said, “Oh, do be careful not to sit on George” followed by “and the bedsprings”, his arms outstretched, alluding to my size.

Before being housebound, when he was still relatively mobile, Mark came to stay with me at my farm in the Spanish mountains. In the mornings, while he was being laboriously hoisted into the swimming pool by the faithful Mohamed, I would prepare to jump into the water as he would shout to the children or the other guests, “Watch out: there’s about to be a tsunami!” Or, as I swam slowly up and down he would say, “You look like the QE2.” The more I splashed him, the more he laughed.

Prior to his illness, Mark loved wine and certainly did not stint on it. It would be followed by the particularly potent liqueur Poire William.

Whenever I had lunch or dinner with him he was maddened by my inability to drink much at lunchtime or, for that matter, at dinner, and he would say, “Oh God, there’s nothing more boring than a woman who doesn’t drink.” Sadly, after the

Courtesy of Lady Annabel

Lady Annabel Goldsmith reminisces about her best friend and former husband, the late, great Mark Birley

Winter 2011

FQR Hostage Special

FQR’s 30 Point Seasonal Survival Guide to Making the Most of your Hostage Experience How to survive captivity, by former hostages Paul and Rachel Chandler

Justin Marozzi was briefly hosted by the Touareg in southern Libya

A

s sailors who cruise the world in their 38ft yacht Lynn Rival, Paul and Rachel Chandler know how to live frugally in a restricted space with comfort.

On 23 October 2009, however, less than 24 hours into a passage from the Seychelles to Tanzania, the Chandlers’ endurance was to be tested to the ultimate limit. Attacked at night by pirates, they were taken into Somalia and imprisoned for 388 days while gangsters attempted to extort millions (they didn’t have) from their family. Constantly being moved around the bush to prevent Islamist terrorist groups from “stealing” them, the Chandlers – planners, managers, doers to the core – had to adjust to a passive role as hostages.

Paul’s 10 Tips to survive indefinite captivity:

1. Find and rely on your inner strength. Don’t worry about things you cannot control. Remember the basics of Stoicism, as elucidated by the Greek philosopher Epictetus (55–135 AD) and, later, by Tom Wolfe in his novel A Man in Full: “I have been given the spark of life; I can accept the truth and reject falsehood; I can choose to act, or not to act; no-one can take that away from me.”

2. Believe that you have not been forgotten – your family and © AFP/Getty true friends are rooting for you.

3. Welcome each night on a positive note, counting down the days to release, which will happen: “X minus 267 days to go.”

4. Trust your moral compass. Another mantra: “We are the good guys – they are the baddies.”

5. Be a good hostage – maintain your dignity but do whatever is necessary to make your situation more tolerable. If this means co-operation or interaction with the bad guys, so be it. You will know it’s a pretence.

6. Maintain personal hygiene. Cleaning teeth, trimming beard and cutting hair give a psychological boost and pass time.

7. Develop a routine. All the mundane tasks of personal existence can fill a surprising amount of time.

8. Yoga is a benefit for body and mind. If exercise is limited, you can maintain suppleness with stretches, while the Corpse pose can be effective in relaxing the mind.

9. If you have books, rediscover the joys of reading aloud: this makes the fourth reading take a lot longer. If you don’t have books, write one – in your head, if necessary.

10. Occupy yourself with practical projects. Implement improvements to your living quarters – make a washing line, form drainage trenches so that your mat stays dry when it rains, or find a way to hang your tarpaulin to protect you from sun, wind, rain and sand. (How do you attach cloth strips to a tarp? Clue: goat droppings.)

don’t let the bad guys’ AK-47-based bravura get you down 1.

Rachel’s 10 Tips to survive indefinite captivity:

Share your problems with the world. Write them down or talk out loud. Don’t let the bad guys’ AK-47based bravura get you down. You may be in one of the most lawless and desolate countries in the world but… dream about civilisation, family and friends, all things British.

2. Keep a diary and tick off the days. Remember special days, birthdays, and events. Look forward to and celebrate Christmas, New Year, Burns Night, Pancake Day and so on. Dwell on the good times, and keep telling yourself you’ll be released in time for the next landmark date.

3. Observe your captors’ behaviour and take advantage of any opportunities to seize a bit of control. Enjoy doing what they allow you to do by yourself. The ritual of making our own morning tea, and drinking it when we decided to, helped us cope with another sweltering day in the bush.

4. Tax the mind. For us a book of cryptic crosswords provided valuable distraction and satisfaction in doing something familiar. Treasure any sources of inspiration, as we did John Gribbin’s book Science: A History, and a transistor radio giving access to the BBC, Voice of Africa, Radio France International.

5. A co-hostage helps with mutual support – though maybe not if a manic-depressive. Devise games to pass time. Make a Scrabble set and spend hours arguing over allowable words.

6. Appreciate – and ration – any comforts you can get or barter for: toilet paper, aspirin, torch and batteries, playing cards.

7. Find something to laugh about or you could go insane. Compose letters to the BBC World Service complaining about the lack of comedy and the irritating announcements telling you to log on to www.bbc. co.uk/worldservice!

8. Feed your brain: sweet tea for breakfast staves off irrational thinking.

9. Stay healthy. Walk as much as you can, if only pacing your room. Improvise – if you run out of dental floss, use thorns as toothpicks.

10. Be patient: dream of rescue… Never give up hope.

Hostage. A Year at Gunpoint with Somali Gangsters by Paul and Rachel Chandler with Sarah Edworthy is published by Mainstream coast with a gun at your head. “Responsible tourism” should always begin with an informed choice of where to travel – now more than ever.

It is not just a saying based on whether you’re happy for your towels to be washed only every six days while on vacation (being mindful of global warming) or whether your “catch of the day” was captured humanely etc. So with safety checks out of the way, after 20 minutes on a domestic flight from Dar Es Salaam, I arrived at the extraordinarily sensual and exotically named gem of an island that is Zanzibar.

Long regarded as one of the most favoured destinations by many a discerning road warrior, just the pronunciation of its name evokes images of spice merchants, ivory traders and adventurers seeking their fortune. The aromas of jasmine and other local spices permeate the air and multicoloured little birds fill it with sound. The 55-minute transfer to The Residence Zanzibar, south-west of the island, takes you through

Zen-ing r a b i z n a Z n It I Kate Lenahan heads to a new resort in Zanzibar

J

ust before I got on the BA flight down to Tanzania a second European woman within a month had been kidnapped on the Kenyan/Somalian border from a secluded resort. Good intelligence from someone in the know reassured me that Zanzibar is not a safety risk although, for obvious reasons, even day trips on boats were not advisable in the event you got a secondary boat trip to a pirates’ enclave up the

www.finchsquarterly.com

1. Make sure your wardrobe is up to it. If you happen to be nabbed in the Sahara, for example, think silk and linen to combat those sun-baked temperatures and impress your captors. Get the crumpled look going early on. Chances are you aren’t going to be changing your clothes much over the next few weeks anyway. As far as sensible footwear is concerned, I find carpincho loafers work well in North Africa. Crocodile loafers are likely to chafe with all that sand. A panama in the desert is a bit Little Englander.

Go native with a pristine white shish, which can double as a scarf, handkerchief and sheet (see 2 below). Coldweather kidnappings can pose more of a challenge sartorially. If you’re heading into freezing climes, pack some fur. It doesn’t hurt to cut a dash.

2. Don’t expect too much in the way of decent bed linens.

It’s unlikely your new hosts will be able to offer you vintage metis linen sheets, rinsed in lavender water, from Provence.

Although this can be a cruel blow, lower your expectations and you may be pleasantly surprised. The damp quilt I had the good fortune to be lent during my recent, all too brief, Courtesy stay with the Touareg tribesmen of southern Libya did the of Justin Marozzi job admirably. I took pleasure in the homemade patchwork and wayward stitching.

3. Be polite but firm. By all means suck up to your captors – but only up to a point. No one likes a toady. You don’t want to let the miserable people who have dared to capture you know that you are worth squillions – and therefore a stupendously large ransom. Nor, however, should you be so self-effacing that you come across as a feeble little nothingburger. They may just slit your throat and be done with it.

4. Travel light. Although I rarely like to be separated from my Globetrotter suitcase, life is a lot simpler if you don’t have too much on you when the hijackers jump into the road waving AK-47s in your face.

They’re only going to steal it anyway.

5. Think about an escape. Initially, I felt rather pathetic not taking my captors on, mowing them all down with a machine gun and hightailing it back to Tripoli for a restorative cup of tea and apple-flavoured shisha. A growling Sir Wilfred Thesiger would surely disapprove of such inaction, I thought. Then I thought about it again: 16 armed young men with Kalashnikovs, who knew the desert like the back of their hands, versus one Brit and his 40-something Libyan friend, accompanied by wife and two-year-old son, who hadn’t got a clue where they were. The conclusion led to 6 below.

6. Enjoy the hospitality. Some people would pay extremely good money for an adventure like this. You’re getting all this for free. Soak it all up. Remember that unrepeatable sunset in the sand dunes, that image of a crescent moon swinging into a star-filled sky. Join your new friends around the campfire, swap a few war stories and tell a few jokes to lighten the atmosphere. This could be your only kidnapping. Treat it as though it’s your last.

7. Ask your kidnappers if you can take notes – insist on it - and make sure you have a decent pen and writing paper to hand. A Moleskine notebook will do the trick. Fountain pens are preferable but will require a decent supply of ink that may not be forthcoming. Turn the whole thing into an extended interview. Think experience of a lifetime. Think life-enhancing adventure. Think book deal, talk shows and shameless publicity.

8. Get a good agent. See 7 above.

9. Learn some Horace. If you can reel off a few stanzas in Latin, you’ll bamboozle your captors and/or impress them beyond reason. Remember that lovely moment on 26 April 1944 when the great warrior-writer Major Patrick Leigh Fermor kidnapped the German General Heinrich Kreipe on Crete. During the 18-day manhunt that followed, the general started murmuring his way through an ode by Horace. Paddy cut in and reeled off the remaining stanzas – in Latin. “We had both drunk at the same fountains long before; and things were different between us for the rest of our time together.” Quite so.

10. Take a tip from Islam and come to terms with the fact that you are no longer master of your own destiny, if you ever were. It’s a liberating discovery. Your life is now in the hands of almighty Allah. He may let you off.

He may not. You may be returned to your loved ones before you can say, “Call that a kidnapping? Is that it?”

Equally, you may be for the cosh, in which case if you are male, 72 doe-eyed virgins will soon be consoling you for your loss of life. It could be worse.

Justin Marozzi is Senior Adviser of Albany Assoc, the author of South from Barbary: Along the Slave Routes of the Libyan Sahara and most recently, The Man Who Invented History: Travels with Herodotus. He is writing a history of Baghdad for Penguin; www.justinmarozzi.com. Follow him @ justinmarozzi

take a tip from Islam and come to terms with the fact that you are no longer master of your own destiny

lush landscapes of coconut palm trees and forests, which are the playground of the protected red colobus monkeys. Roadside, locals sell sarongs and papayas and the island’s powdery white beaches can be glimpsed through tall palm trees that bend low in the tropical breeze as if in formal greeting.

The Residence Zanzibar is a 66-villa resort (with beach- and garden-view villas all with their own pools) absolutely deserving of the exceptional reviews it has been garnering since it opened in April 2011. The food and the service are without question the best I have come across in the three years of doing this column. With sister properties in Tunis and Mauritius, this East African sibling is being seamlessly managed. Each villa also comes with its own butler; bikes and buggies get you round the peaceful grounds, and the signature interiors of teak and limestone complement the secluded beach location rather than overwhelm it – which is often the crime of luxury chain resorts. A Zen-like simplicity is

day trips were not advisable in the event you got a boat trip to a pirates’ enclave up the coast with a gun at your head

14

the message, and it is succesfully communicated.

A Carita Spa offers wonderful treatments and the private beach is pristinely maintained. The daily 8am sight of Bosse, the resort’s huge black bull pulling a cart along the beach to clean it, coupled with local men and women scouting fish from the shallows, form primitive rituals that are incredibly moving to witness. On the third day a must was the visit to Stone Town – meandering through the hot streets I marvelled at the ancient studded doors that lined them, stores selling local wares including silver jewellery, beaded sandals and African print sarongs.

Ending the day with rooftop sundowners The 236 Hurumzi Boutique Hotel made for an Arabian Nights setting with expansive views across the town’s rooftops. And no visit is complete in Stone Town until you pose outside the house where its most famous resident, the late, great Mr Freddie Mercury, was born.

Come to this beguiling island soon, while it remains a truly authentic tropical Eden with its ancient sultanate heritage and its friendly islanders.

Kate Lenahan is Travel Editor of Finch’s Quarterly Review. She flew British Airways. www.ba.com. www.theresidence.com

Winter 2011

Paws and Rewild Aiming to create Europe’s largest forest wilderness is no easy goal, and Paul Lister doesn’t stop there in his dream to conserve and rewild

B

ack in the Eighties, I was travelling round Eastern Europe sourcing forest wood for my furniture business. Ironically, today I am working to conserve those very forests and the wildlife they sustain through a foundation I set up called The European Nature Trust (TENT).

The forestry we are working to conserve is part of the Carpathian Mountains in Romania.

The majority of the Carpathians, some 100,000sq km, is located in Romania, and 80 per cent is covered with unspoilt mountain forests – the largest contiguous forest in Central and Eastern Europe; home to almost one third of all European large carnivores, an estimated 5,000 bears, 3,000 wolves and some 2,000 lynx. This is the highest concentration of large carnivores anywhere in Europe.

However, the forests and species they sustain are now being threatened by illegal logging. So our aim is to create Europe’s largest forest wilderness: a protected private National Park of 50,000 hectares. We are doing this with the help of an eminent wolf scientist, Christoph Promberger, who ran the nowconcluded Carpathian Large Carnivore Project in Romania.

Over the years, he and his team have radio-collared wolves, lynx and bears and closely monitored economic aspects of livestock breeding, ecotourism and trophy hunting. When he first arrived in Romania to study wolves he lived in a hut in the mountains with two wolves rescued from a communist fur farm. He has now been in Transylvania for over 15 years and has come to realise what a natural gold mine this area is and how important it is to protect it.

What his work has shown is the important role carnivores such as wolves play in nature in keeping numbers of other species, such as deer, under control. This allows the regeneration of flora and fauna, which otherwise would be eaten away by these species. The successful reintroduction of wolves into the Yellowstone National Park in 1995 and the resulting increase in biodiversity and tree regeneration are proof of this.

Many years ago the Scottish Highlands were similar to the Carpathian Mountains, thick with Caledonian Pine forest, which once covered an

expanse of 1.5m hectares and was home to bears and wolves. However, over the centuries the great Caledonian forests have been cleared, their size drastically reduced to just 16,000ha. As a result, the species they once supported have disappeared or been removed by man – the last two wolves in Scotland were shot dead in 1794.

The landscape has altered dramatically; grass, moss and heather now predominate, giving it a very barren and windswept appearance; tree roots are no longer present to help bind the soil. Deer numbers have grown dramatically, no longer kept in check by wolves. New shoots and saplings don’t have a chance of growing as they are grazed out by the herds.

As a landowner in Scotland, what I wanted to do was to restore my 23,000ha area in Scotland, called Alladale, to its former glory by creating a wilderness reserve. We now have wild boar, wildcat, bison and a pair of elk (Hulda and Hercules), who gave birth to their first calf earlier this year – the first to be born north of the Great Glen for more than 3,000 years.

One day we hope to rehabilitate a pack of wolves. We also have a treeplanting programme and by the autumn of 2012, 600,000 native trees will have been planted on the Reserve alone.

The wild Carpathian Mountains are what Scotland used to be. My dream is to re-create that forestry and biodiversity in Scotland on a small area so we can experience what Scotland used to be like and show and teach our children and children’s children the importance of conservation.

Most importantly, though, we have a living example: the awe-inspiring Carpathian Mountains, which we need to conserve. I recently produced a documentary, Wild Carpathia, on this area, showing it in all its glory and some of the issues that threatened it. It features an interview with HRH Prince of Wales, who is also an advocate of the amazing natural and cultural heritage of Transylvania. I hope it will inspire others to see the value in protecting these last areas of wilderness, the species such as wolves they support and the important role they play in our world.

Paul Lister is the owner of Alladale Wilderness Reserve, www.alladale.com, and founder of The European Nature Trust (TENT), which aims to protect and restore wilderness areas in Europe; www.theeuropeannaturetrust.com

when he arrived in Romania he lived in a hut with two wolves

Happy Returns

A first visit to his father’s home country, from which he’d been forced to flee, opened Tibor Kálnoky’s eyes – and heart – to the pristine charms and possibilities of Romania

I

t was 1987. The communist dictator Ceausescu and his secret police “Securitate” still had Romania in their clutches; in fact, most Romanians at that time probably could not remember life to have ever been different from what it was then.

But some elderly people in a small Transylvanian village could. All of a sudden, a face brought back memories long buried, the face of my father entering the local Catholic church at 6.30 in the morning.

www.finchsquarterly.com

I

f, like me, you’ve the snow acting caught the disease as a canvas for the of seeking out wolf ’s footprints. the unusual and the New snow is exciting, then wolf preferred as it makes hunting is a “must-have” tracking easier. More experience. You’ll invariably get often than not, the wolves a gasp of bemusement from your can be found in the vicinity of colleagues and will certainly large saigak herds (antelopes provide a gripping and intriguing that are nearly extinct in topic for any dinner party. It Central Asia). They follow offers the intensity of an African them throughout the winter, Goga Ashkenazi gets her teeth into safari and requires both skill and killing only when they are wolf hunting in Kazakhstan experience. It is, however, the hungry and hence using sense of danger and constant the herd as we humans use competition with the animal refrigerators, keeping the that makes this a consummate experience. Although I, of food fresh and available any time. Having located the course, might be slightly biased… herd, we use helicopters to get to that spot since saigaks, My wolf-hunting experiences have almost exclusively betrayed by people on so many occasions in the past, do taken place in my country – of which I am eternally and not like to come close to any human settlement. Stalkers increasingly proud – Kazakhstan. (I will pause for an then point out the tracks and the general direction and instant to allow for any Borat jokes that may be running we get on snowmobiles. This is when the fun begins! eing in the depth of the steppes of Kazakhstan through your head!) Kazakhstan, with its endless steppes in the winter, especially with overcast skies, with and natural resources, has also been blessed with the white below and above, you lose your sense of most remarkable wild shooting sites in the world: wild boar and deer, pheasant and partridge, grouse and duck, direction as you are carried by your metal horse into Marco Polo sheep (joke!), herdsmen (another dreadful the wilderness. Yet one has to maintain quite a speed to draw nearer to the animal, joke!) and wolves. whose endurance and speed are Historically, wolves have been bewildering. (Wolves can reach hunted to protect livestock, for their speeds of up to 40mph.) The skins and sometimes to protect chase can and ordinarily does people. Geographically, there were last hours – or even, in some no constraints until this magnificent cases, days. The Wolf (notice animal was hunted down to extinction the capital letter – homage to its in some parts of the world. William magnificence) is one of the most the Conqueror granted lordships on intelligent species, with the most condition that the lords would “defend land from enemies and wolves”; Mary, Queen of Scots, is consummate instinct of survival. When feeling danger, it known to have enjoyed wolf hunting in the Atholl forest in will use every possible and often astonishing technique the 16th century. Wolves were hunted in Italy, Spain, France and strategy to confuse and bewilder its assailant. I have (Napoleon took part), Eastern Europe, Asia, even Tibet. In witnessed wolves tangling the tracks, walking backwards, India, Hindus considered it taboo for fear of causing a bad jumping, using obstacles (stones etc), walking on back harvest. Currently, many governments have declared wolves paws, hugging trees to disconcert their followers. And an endangered species so killing them is illegal, although very often this brilliant animal wins, leaving the hunters with nothing but exhaustion. If, however, luck is on your official culls are permitted to protect farm animals.

In Kazakhstan, the population of wolves has been on side that day, you get the great privilege of touching upon the rise despite the fact that 2,000 are killed every year. Its its greatness and delivering this incredible animal’s nature growing population presents a problem for agriculture, consecrated end. Yet even after the seemingly lethal shot, and the government encourages wolf hunting. It has the duel is not over. The wolf can fake its own death and become quite fashionable, especially among the rich. will make a last leap to life, charging at you with its final A great number of methods are used: from luring, outrage – and this is when you shoot your last shot!

Seizing the life of this majestic species leaves you with calling, flogging, driving, hunting with dogs and eagles, to poisoning and trapping. Sometimes the methods of a sense of grief and a sense of dignified glory because this the kill are truly graceless (shooting from helicopters contest was intended by nature itself, and the life of this or Jeeps). However, when properly executed it is a true animal has been honoured by a dignified death.

Born in Kazakhstan and raised in Moscow, Goga adventure, unrivalled in its vigour and extravagance.

We organise wolf hunts only in the winter. It is the Ashkenazi, is an entrepreneur with business interests only season that enables us to locate the wolves, with in Kazakhstan, Moscow and the West

Goga & The Wolf

B

wolf hunting has become quite fashionable

Surely it could not be, they must have thought – not the Count? He couldn’t even have got into the country, could he, and if he had, why would he choose to attend the early-morning mass at sunrise?

A crowd gathered in front of the church entrance.

When we came out, dozens of people first stared, then started weeping, grinning, kissing my father’s hands, and thanking the Lord for having kept them alive to witness this moment.

They recognised my father for what he was – the son of the last Count Kálnoky, who had been forced to flee when Nazi Intelligence realised he was working against the fascist régime. Later, the communists expropriated everything he had owned and my family had to leave Central Europe for good, as it then seemed.

But back to 1987. As half of the village had gathered around us and accompanied us to have a look at our former home, used as a grain store and local Party headquarters, word came that a column of cars was approaching. This could only mean one thing: the Securitate were coming to check what was happening. Following an almost imperceptible gesture of my father, the villagers vanished into their houses, and we hopped into our 4x4 and left the village by a forest track through the hills.

I now know that this was the defining moment of my life. I was 20 years old, a student in Germany, but not German. There were languages I spoke in, countries I had lived in, but none that I could call my own. Maybe

that is why I patiently talked my father into visiting his home country, despite all the difficulties. And finally, on that day in 1987, I found my home.

Two years later the Dictator was killed and the ensuing post-communist decade of the Nineties gradually made it possible for us to return.

Ever since 1987 I pondered the question of how to bring back the family to Transylvania, where my ancestors lived for 750 years. Having had 200 guests from all over the world stay in the village of Miklósvár for my wedding, an idea began to take shape: to use the family’s cultural heritage to attract visitors interested in our region and its culture where the Middle Ages are still very much part of the present, and bears and wolves still roam the forests. Where there must be a witch and a few ghosts in a village worth its salt, where kids make their own sleighs come winter, where the priest throws a loaf of bread with a candle in it into the river if the corpse of some drowned man is to be found.

Dreams may shape destinies, but reality must be mastered. Romanian reality, and that of rural Transylvania, turned out to be quite a challenge.

It took 10 years of effort to get back the family’s mansion in Köröspatak, a beautiful Renaissance building in the picturesque village of Miklósvár and several decrepit remains of village houses.

We started restoring some of the houses.

Furnished with old painted furniture and heated by large ceramic stoves or open

the Middle Ages are still very much part of the present, and bears and wolves still roam the forests

16

fireplaces, they have now regained their old spirit.

We just added a little modern comfort, such as stylish bathrooms with running, warm water – in a village barely provided with electrical power.

The Prince of Wales, who has a long-standing interest in the region, asked us to help restore a small house in a Saxon village (Viscri), and we also created a nature retreat for him in a hamlet in the hills called Zalanpatak. He decided to open these houses to guests when he isn’t there.

This landscape is also a paradise for horse-riding, as the gentle hills have no fences, walls or roads. We guide groups of riders on week-long rides through seemingly never-ending parklands.

But generally speaking, our guests can now discover Transylvania as one of Europe’s last havens of pristine harmony between man and nature and, through their presence, help us preserve it.

Count Tibor Kálnoky returned to his ancestral home in Transylvania in 1996 and now runs a number of beautifully renovated guesthouses on his estate; www.transylvaniancastle.com

Winter 2011

Illustration by Benjamin Seidler

FQR Transylvania and Wolves Special Focus

FQR Transylvania and Wolves Special Focus

M

y first memory of Romania is from the early Eighties when we went every year to take medicine, clothing and money to relatives. Ceausescu’s dictatorship was not easy to survive.

As members of the Hungarian minority and former landowners, my family was considered an enemy of the State: regularly interrogated by the Securitate (Romanian Secret Service), and barred from higher education. My grandmother spent two years in a labour camp. All my family’s property was taken away. They were not allowed to travel, even in Romania itself, they had to apply for special permission to leave the official address where they were forced to live by the State.

My mother was “bought out” by a German relative who was a politician and therefore could leave Romania when she was 16. She was three when the family was thrown out of their estate. I was born in Austria, and studied and worked in London.

Now for 10 years I have been living in Transylvania, together with my family in a secluded village, Zabola, the family home for centuries.

As children, we always heard stories about the good old times before the two World Wars and communism – horses, hunts, sawmills, glass factories, bears and wolves – but also about World Wars I and II, the nationalisations in 1949 and imprisonment.

Zabola nestles at the foot of the Carpathians and has been a family property for over 500 years – in fact, the oldest property of the Mikes (pronounced “Mickesh”) family. They were from the Székely (pronounced “Se-kay”) tribe, members of a Hungarian-speaking people who came to the Transylvanian plains around 1,000 years ago. Székely are tough, independent and mordantly humorous people who defended the borders of Transylvania, Hungary and, later, the Habsburg Empire from

From A to Zabola To Gregor Roy Chowdhury, family history proved an irresistible draw, leading him home to Transylvania, and his ancestors’ former estate

the Turks. In return, they enjoyed the privilege of self-government like Russia’s Cossacks, free from serfdom and foreign military service.

My great-grandfather, Ármin Mikes, the last owner of Zabola Estate, was one of the largest landowners. The land reform of the 1920s, after Transylvania became part of Romania (the effect of World War I), left him with a small portion of what was once there. He still managed to enlarge the estate beyond its previous size and some companies he created even made it to the stock exchange in Bucharest and Budapest – nevertheless, everything was taken away again in 1949. Actually, this “fluctuation” of property has been a recurrent part of our history for the past few centuries.

In 2001 my father unexpectedly passed away. I thought I did not want to end up in one of those corner offices, and so left my banking career in the City in London temporarily to renovate a small house in Zabola. After four months I was still there, living out of a suitcase and Christmas was approaching… That was when I decided to give it a try – and I am still here.

Restitution has been, and is still, often like something out of a Kafka novel. For example, even though a land registry has existed since Maria Theresa (the Habsburg monarch in the 18th century) and the family property is listed there, we had to collect 30 old men in their 80s and 90s to

swear an oath that the properties we claim have been owned by the family.

It took years to slowly renovate the property and open it up for tourism. We run a small six-bedroom guesthouse, The Machine House, and are fixing the so-called New Castle, a turn-of-the-century building, which was originally built for private guests to host an additional 16 rooms. We cook partly according to 18th- and 19th-century aristocratic Transylvanian cookbooks – one of my wife’s passions. She is collecting old recipes to help rediscover the diversity and richness of Transylvanian cuisine. We have lots of trout from the river and game, including wild boar. I believe that, surrounded by 40 hectares of park, guests are unlikely to feel crowded out here and are free to roam through the treelined avenues and lawns. And, behind the park is untouched wilderness. Bearwatching is offered at our recently renovated hunting lodge, Dobrica, close to the St Anna volcano crater lake. ne of the most amazing things about Transylvania is its cultural variety, but decades of communism and then transition have resulted in depressed living standards. Providing employment is helping to regenerate village economies.

I feel a deep emotional connection with the village and the region, even though I was born and raised in Austria and moved to Romania at 23. What I have learned living here is that one cannot escape one’s family history.

Gregor Roy Chowdhury is the proprietor of Zabola Estate which lies at the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains in Transylvania.

After the harrowing years of Communism, he and his family have returned to Transylvania to rebuild their ancestral home and now run a guesthouse and hunting lodge for bear-watching on the estate; www.zabola.com

O

Nicky Haslam’s Top Tips For Buying a House In Romania

I

am really the least suitable person to ask for tips on how to buy a house in Romania as I bought mine on a whim, off the internet and, de plus, sight unseen.

Happily, the reality lived up to my capriciousness; the tiny, 100-year-old farmhouse is surrounded by plum orchards on the edge of a one-street village set in the Transylvanian foothills. So my useless advice would be…

1. Throw caution to the winds.

2. Trust people.

3. Jump on a plane to Cluj, the capital of Transylvania.

4. Rent a car and explore the breathtaking landscape that surrounds it.

5. Buy a property.

6. While it’s being renovated, stay in room 406 at the Opera Plaza Hotel, brand-new and as good as a Ritz, with the sweetest staff imaginable.

7. Be patient. It’s a very relaxed train de vie.

8. Try tripe soup. Sounds vile, is delicious.

Nicky Haslam is a renowned interior designer and founder of the London-based interior design firm NH Design Inc www.nh-design.co.uk. He is also a singer and for two days this month will be performing classic songs

by Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Rodgers & Hammerstein and others at The Beaufort Bar, The Savoy

Road To Ruin

Transylvanian nobleman, politician, writer, illustrator… Count Miklós Bánffy’s fortunes changed markedly during his lifetime, says Zsolna Ugron

O

ne day before the end of 1916, Karl Franz Josef Ludwig Hubert Georg Maria von Habsburg-Lothringen was crowned King of Hungary in Budapest. Among the extravagant splendour of the ceremony – a pageant never to be repeated – and the elegant crowd and high society of the monarchy, there were the war veterans whose privilege it was to receive the accolade from their sovereign. Heavily wounded, leaning on crutches, some of them blind, they slowly processed into the St Mathias cathedral, “all the sad grey tragedy of the war flooded the place where all had been shine and glitter”, as the master of ceremonies writes years later in his memoirs, which have been edited by his daughter and published under the title The Phoenix Land.

Count Miklós Bánffy is mostly remembered as a

Winter 2011

writer. He was the last of the Count Bánffys, one of the ancient Hungarian families and among the richest landowners of Transylvania. Born in Cluj in Transylvania in 1873 – then Kolozsvár/Klausenburg under the Austro-Hungarian monarchy – Bánffy was one of the privileged, a great thinker and a brave dreamer.

His plays and novels were not always welcomed by other aristocrats, since his realistic and progressive approach sometimes criticised their way of life. Civil democrats, who stood closest to his political belief, were not too welcoming either, complaining about his extravagance and fondness of centuries-old rituals and traditions.

Following the family tradition, he entered politics at a young age. From 1901 he was a non-party representative of Kolozsvár in the Hungarian parliament. Spending time in Budapest and being known for his artistic talents, he was quickly appointed to be the Director of the National Theatre and Opera, where he was the biggest supporter of Béla Bartók’s stage works. At the same time, he managed to channel his political views in his literary and artistic works. Not only did he write plays, he directed them, also designing costumes and sets.

If he had not been a writer and politician, he would be remembered as one of this century’s notable graphic illustrators. Under the name of Ben Myll

he published a collection of portraits of European politicians in 1922: Fresques et frasques. During World War I he was sent on diplomatic missions, representing Hungary in Istanbul and Sofia. After the War, when the Communist Party came to power in Hungary, Bánffy retired to his estate in Transylvania.

However, when he was later asked to join the new Hungarian government by fellow Transylvanian and conservative politician Count István Bethlen, he accepted the office of State Secretary of Foreign Affairs in 1921. The following year, he resigned. Shortly after Transylvania was detached from Hungary and attached to Romania, Bánffy received his Romanian citizenship personally from King Ferdinand, the second king of the Romanian dynasty.

Living in Bonchida, at his beautiful castle where he never allowed the introduction of electricity and so continued to write by candlelight, he started one of his most important works, the best realistic novels of his time, The Transylvanian Trilogy.

In 1943, on behalf of the Hungarian Prime Minister Miklós Kállay, Bánffy took on a political mission once again and secretly travelled to Bucharest to negotiate with Romanian politicians over the situation of Transylvania. His efforts failed. After the War, in 1948 all his properties were confiscated. He moved to

at his castle he continued to write by candlelight

17

Kolozsvár/Cluj. By this time he was old, poor and ill.

He fled Romania in 1950 and left for Budapest, where he died in poverty. Till the end of his life he worked on a continuation of his memoirs. ast summer, with some cousins and friends, we organised a party in Bonchida. There is not much left of Bánffy’s castle, once one of the most elegant country houses of Eastern Europe. We were about to dine in the former stables when one of my cousins (a Bánffy distantly related to Miklós) told me a story she had heard from her grandmother. She told me how coffee was served at the stables when Miklós Bánffy lived there. Among the marble walls built for Bánffy’s famously well-bred horses, the guests were asked to join the lord of the house after lunch for coffee – it was a ritual never missed.

I was looking at the bare walls, mementos of a bygone era. We were surrounded by a ruin. No roof, no windows, really nothing much left. The past 60 years have certainly left a mark – and not only on the buildings. But there we were dancing. Among us were a few who have returned to Transylvania from abroad to settle there. I hope Miklós would have liked seeing us dancing there.

Zsolna Ugron is an author and journalist.

Her latest book is the bestselling Hungarian novel: Úrilányok Erdélyben, a postmodern Transylvanian love story (2011)

L

www.finchsquarterly.com

Flowers. They celebrate the cardinal rites of passage of our lives.

They help cure the ills of mankind.

They are the nectar of our food chain and, above all, they joyously brighten up our lives.

Recently, after a particularly challenging day, I stepped through my front door and was elated to find a gorgeous bouquet of brilliant flowers from Rob Van Helden Floral Design waiting for me. The sight of the colourful blossoms immediately lifted my spirits and heightened my mood. In a world dominated by technology, flowers provide an oasis of natural beauty. In a virtual reality of iPads, iPhones and iEverything, they remind us that we are of the earth. Flowers kindle romance, smooth the way for forgiveness, and assuage grief. And

L

the simple flower can confer very real power.

“Flower Power” was Allen Ginsberg’s protest against the Vietnam War. Taking a hint from Gandhi, Ginsberg encouraged anti-war protestors to give flowers and toys to riot police, rather than take violent action. This is how the hippie generation was born. Flowers became a symbol of peace, and hippies wore flower halos in their hair and daisy chains.

Such is the power of flowers that the First Lady of France, Carla Bruni, cites Nicolas Sarkozy’s knowledge of flowers as the reason she fell for the president. “My God, I must marry this man, he’s the president and he knows everything about flowers as well. This is incredible,” she said.

It’s true: women love flowers. They awaken so many of our senses… sight, smell, touch. Perhaps we relate to them because they are what we strive to be: beautiful, sweet and fragrant, yet commanding attention. When Paul McCartney wed his current bride, heiress Nancy Shevell, she wore a single white flower in her hair. No need for a long gown or lavish party, the simple, elegant

flower announced to the world that she was the antithesis of Heather Mills – beautiful, down to earth and here to stay.

While our status is often measured by our acquisitions, flowers – ubiquitous in parks and public gardens – are free to all. New York has Central Park, Paris the Tuileries and Rome the Villa Borghese, but London is blessed with so many public spaces – Hyde Park, Regent’s Park, Hampstead Heath, Battersea Park, Holland Park, St James’s Park and more – through the misty rains and fog. Flowers are egalitarian.

This spring, fashion will also be generous with flowers. London Fashion Week, which showed the most extraordinary British collections to date, saw many of the top British designers combining high-tech and flowers. Christopher Kane’s collection showed models sauntering down the catwalk wearing pale metallic shift dresses with subtle shimmering floral patterns culminating in sci-fi pop-art digital flower dresses overlaid with organza.

Meanwhile, Mary Katrantzou’s show took place around a cacophony of red, fuchsia and white carnations laid out in a rectangle in the middle of the runway.

Her silhouettes were streamlined and ultra-modern but her prints brought in clashing floral patterns in A/W:Layout 1 21/10/11 14:58 Page 1

the simple flower can confer very real power

My Worst Nightmare Matthew Modine has a dream, but it’s one he’d really rather forget

ast night I had a dream. There were several large men who came to my apartment. They each wore dark glasses and darker suits. They didn’t smile. Occasionally, they whispered into their cuff links. I did my best to smile before asking, “May I help you?” Their reply was to lift me up and whisk me to a waiting car. The windows were darkened and I had no idea where I was going or what awaited me. A handkerchief was placed over my nose and mouth and when I awoke I was in the office of the most bizarre place I could have ever imagined!

I was at Crawford Ranch, the so-called Southwest Capital. The Texas home of former President George W Bush. How could this be?! I looked at my watch and the hands were spinning backwards! Pages from a calendar (beside a large taxidermied beast) were magically being lifted from the floor and pasted back as time seemed to spin backward! My mind raced. I was as confused and baffled as Rod Taylor always seemed to look in the cinematic adaptation of HG Wells’ The Time Machine.

I was led to a large room by the darkly dressed goons. I was then pushed into the cavernous room, which, bizarrely, smelled of beef jerky and cheese-flavoured Doritos. Behind a large desk, backlit by the bright Texas sunlight, was the shape of a man. He spoke, but his lips did not move.

“Well, hello, Mr President. It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

“Oh, thank you. Thank you very much. That’s very generous of you.”

“Um, uh, Mr President, you seem to be having trouble sitting up straight in your chair. Here, let me help you… WOW, sweet Jesus! You seem to be missing something. Something important. Holy Christ!

Where’s your spine, Mr President?! What’s that? It was part of the price? The price you had to pay?

“Oh, I see. Yes. Yes, of course, life is full of compromises. Yes. Yes. Special-interest groups.

Foreign policies. Paybacks. Lobbyists. Yes, but your spine? Oh. So, your spine was the price you had to pay in order to become the leader of this powerful nation?

No? Not the full price? Only part? Jeez. I can’t imagine what else you’d have to give up… You’re like an eel.

www.finchsquarterly.com

I see, but, um, I don’t understand, Mr President.

How can not having a backbone… yes, I’m sorry, a spine, be advantageous for our country’s most powerful leader? You don’t have to take a stand?

You don’t have to stand up for what you believe in?

But, technically, that’s part of the job… Well, yes, technically you can’t stand up. So, well, you’re right, you don’t have to… right. Not without being propped up by those people that you gave your backbone – sorry, your spine – to. I don’t know if I could give up my spine, Mr President. It’s a huge price to pay.

What’s that..?

Your spine was just a deposit? Like, sort of a down payment, so to speak? Your will? You had to give them your will?! And your soul!

Good grief! But, why, Mr President? To gain the world, but lose your soul! What does all this mean? What does all this say about democracy in the Free World!

There is no more democracy? But… It’s been replaced? Ever since the Cold War… Finito? But that’s what America is fighting for! That’s what America is always fighting for!

Democracy! A square meal and a colour TV in everyone’s home!

What? Democracy is just a word we throw around to justify a war? That’s horrible, Mr President. Please don’t say things like that. People are dying.

Young Americans are fighting for that word. Please don’t say they aren’t dying for… hat? Democracy is dead? NO! Stop grinning at me, Mr President. You’re scaring me. We live in a democracy, remember? NO, no, I won’t stop saying it! Why? You want to – what? Whisper in my ear? But… OK, all right. What is it? Capitalism? What about it?

No Republican Party? No Democratic Party? There are no more parties? But… but… only capitalism?

Just capitalism? Wow.” And then, as if someone had thrown icy-cold water in my face, I awoke. It was winter. Cold. I looked at my calender. December 2011. Thankfully, this had all been a dream! I was no longer living in the Bush/ Cheney nightmare world. I smiled and arose from my slumber knowing that the leader of the free world was an intelligent man born in the great state of Hawaii.

With his spine firmly intact.

Matthew Modine is FQR’s liberal-at-large

vibrant colours. Her finale dress – a gorgeous one-shouldered gown of metal flowers, rivets and sequins, juxtaposed futuristic materials and nature to perfection. atthew Williamson put behind his bohochic designs in favour of a more grown-up, elegant prettiness. His prints were abstract flowers in bright orange and yellow. At Peter Pilotto’s show, the models wore shoes designed by Nicholas Kirkwood that married flowered tops and Lucite heels. One of my favourite hot British designers, Erdem, has always used flower prints as his signature but this season his show was more innocent and idyllic than ever before.

While in the past hemlines dropped and colours muted during a recession, London Fashion Week proved that we are going to battle these tough economic times with prettiness and colour. The new Flower Power is a remedy to the straitened times we are facing. So, post-Christmas, expect to find me strolling around the Serpentine in Nicholas Kirkwoods, a Christopher Kane dress, a flower in my hair, reading Ginsberg on my iPad. Heather Kerzner is FQR’s Chief Fashion Correspondent and a founder and co-chair of the Fashion Trust for the British Fashion Council. She has been an Official Judge for Donald Trump’s Miss Universe Organisation, is the Chairwoman for the Marie Curie Cancer Gala and has been involved with many charities.

M

VEEDON FLEECE

A custom weaving house specialising in hand knotted carpets

W

20

“Happy Blondes”

Purely bespoke and exclusively to your specification Muga ~ Pashmina ~ Silk ~ Veedon ~ Wool www.veedonfleece.com veedon@veedonfleece.com Telephone: +44 (0)1483 575758 Winter 2011

FQR Adventures

Speke: The Truth

I

t is one of life’s rites of passage, surely, to set the prejudices of your parents on one side and start deciding things for yourself. It’s an assertion that you are a sentient, autonomous being. But when the

object of their admiration is an ancestor, things get complicated.

Where’s free will then? If you don’t share,

Eric Cook Bespoke Shoes

or even if you question, their adoration of him or her, does this make you a dangerous subversive?

This is my problem with the Victorian explorer John Hanning Speke, my great-great-great-greatuncle, who is credited with being the first white man to see the source of the Nile. It would be an exaggeration to say I was brought up to believe that Speke was in the Winston Churchill, Julius Caesar, Galileo, Shakespeare class, but certainly he was someone of whom my family was extremely proud. And we aren’t even called Speke, we’re called Hanning, which was the surname of Speke’s mother, and we aren’t direct descendants.

He had no offspring.

But even an adolescent churl such as myself had to admit there was a lot to be proud of. After 10 years in India, where he served in the Punjab and the Second Sikh Wars, mapped parts of the Himalayas and drew birds, he had earned some time off. So he and Richard Burton, the celebrated polyglot Arabist explorer, arrived in 1856 in Bagamoyo on Africa’s East coast (in the unlikely event that Finch’s Quarterly readers don’t know it, it’s on the mainland, across from Zanzibar), hoping to find the source of the Nile by pushing west into what was unapologetically called “darkest Africa”. They had encountered extraordinary hazards and both became very ill even before

arriving at Bagamoyo, Burton having had a lance through his cheek and Speke being speared pretty well everywhere else 11 times.

The pair spent over six months travelling west, looking for a rumoured great lake. Eventually, they reached Lake Tanganyika, situated about a third of the way across the continent from Zanzibar. They were not to know, but they had gone too far west and not far enough north. Both were suffering horribly.

Burton, stricken with malaria, was carried on a stretcher and Speke, largely blinded by the sun, travelled on a donkey, his hearing impaired by a beetle that had crawled into his ear and required a knife, which burst his eardrum, to remove it.

As they headed back towards the coast, the pair, never soulmates, became increasingly fractious, but they carried on travelling.

On arriving back at Tabora, a largish town on the old Arab trading route, Speke suggested they go north. Burton was too ill, but it turned out to be an inspired hunch. After a couple of weeks of travelling, he found himself on the southern shore of what is now known as Lake Victoria. Speke did not travel round the lake to find the point where the Nile flowed out, but decided that so vast was this inland sea, it had to be the source.

Speke couldn’t prove any such thing, said Burton, deriding his younger partner’s enthusiasm. At this point the ill-concealed animosity between the buttoned-up, dutiful, gun-toting sportsman Speke and the learned, licentious and unpredictable Burton acquired a genuine, almost theological pretext. Just because Speke had seen a vast inland area of water, why should that be taken to be the source, asked Burton.

The pair returned to England with the matter Courtesy of The Royal Geographical Society

James Hanning sees his ancestor, the explorer John Hanning Speke, vindicated – and in so doing leaves his unimpressed teen self behind

unresolved. Speke made a promise to Burton that he would not reveal what he believed he had seen, but in the event, evidently encouraged by a publisher, did precisely that. Following a further trip, when Speke did travel round the lake, but not wholly conclusively, the pair were due to resolve the issue in a debate in Bath. The debate never took place. Speke, out shooting that morning, died when his gun went off as he climbed a stone wall.

To a spotty 20th-century teenager, this was all very well, but I was determined to be unimpressed. How could Speke be so heroic if: a) he ratted on his deal with Burton, b) he was, as some historians believe, “a closet queer”, as my parents’ generation would put it (it was the closetness, not the queerness, that I mistrusted), and c) he shot himself rather than risk losing the make-or-break debate?

The “queer” issue was, of course, not an issue because: a) why on earth not? b) there seemed to be no evidence of any leanings – he might have been what used to be called a “non-player”, and c) there is now evidence of a rather charming brand of heterosexuality.

Mercifully, thanks to the passing of time and Alexander Maitland, Jan Morris and, very recently, Tim Jeal, I have found other reasons to leave that bolshy teenager far behind. Alex Maitland, who wrote a splendid biography of Speke in 1971, concluded that he didn’t shoot himself, a view endorsed with some vehemence when, for work, I spoke to Jan Morris and she said my surname rang a bell. “Of course he didn’t commit suicide – what absolute nonsense!” said the great historian of empire, which was good enough for me.

And now Tim Jeal has produced perhaps the greatest vindication of Speke and his works to date, clearing him on all three counts and unearthing new evidence to show he was a bit of an old romantic, mooning about, professing his love for young African princesses, and showing an admirable concern (for the time) for the local bearers who made the trip possible.

And most of all, of course, he was right about the source. He didn’t live to prove it but, apart from apparently leaving a good impression of his country on his travels, his intuition was right.

That, as a spellbound audience at the Royal Geographical Society was reminded by Alexander Maitland recently, is what distinguished Speke, the explorer, from Burton, the traveller. That’ll do for me.

James Hanning is deputy editor of The Independent on Sunday and co-author of the biography of David Cameron. He lives in Fulham with his wife and two children. He hankers after the chance to travel in Speke’s footsteps

ude John Malkovich, they have been plentiful – incl nt orta imp st mo the of n one tthew Modine, takes individuality, has bee a roll of the dice I have Kevin Spacey, Emma Thompson, Ma so Cuarón, ch Fin es arl Ch s, end r yea r my life and As anothe omfield, Julian Sands, Alphon tion and of chapters of r, voice, full of irony Nick Bro stock of his eponymous publica Jeremy Thomas, Tom Hoope continued to ride. Nick’s magical has for the Bertrand Tavernier, that e se nie tun pro Min for his d ne, of e Sto goo anc n ron eleg ow his Loren, Sha rterly, and and satire, the paper, Richard E Grant, Sophia his is our 14th issue of Finch’s Qua rs saturated the pages of this yea Dreyfuss, Alice Eve, Lucy e thre hard t Ric pas g, Roe Nic my ver, gs from s out there who Dri one y luck us of it’s probably time to say a few thin all to n Louboutin, Evgeny gift a istia n has bee , Dana Delany, Chr Liu the ed ak. add spe to then so k, tram stic end of the Haslam, Dylan Jones, publication. Tris Lebedev, Tim Jeffries, Nicky t thing. It receive this sien into tran lved a evo is re, that p natu rshi very tne its par Luck, by la Frostrup, Jason McCue, al brilliance to the and Adam Dawtrey, Mariel w tingly that a man visu gro flee to so s ed goe tinu and con es has com ch es sometim id de Rothschild, Jean Pigozzi, this publication, whi genius. Terence Conran, Dav and it at all. To recognise rgy had ene th he’s ed es bin ledg com ir now the ack ly bare ain itself with Lady Annabel Goldsmith, Elizabe arious times is, in sust 00 people see Graydon Carter, 40,0 r se, ove hou that New e n mat atha esti Jon we , one’s good fortune in these prec identally l Chow, good life – especially Inc letter from Saltzman, Michae and we have only had one irate my opinion, essential to living a e, issu und Taxis, Emilia Hungerford, h rn eac Thu von th king abe bac Elis ”. and llop ses swa ines cod bus s “thi ting ive star n rece Lenahan, Maya Even, didn’t want to in my case, whe Olga of Greece, Al Ruddy, Kate an everyday someone who is our ds, ed crib bran to des w vies fello mo tled from s, run , Jeff Koons, Arnaud this disg unlikely idea Simon de Pur y, Francesco Vezzoli can imagine The fact that that one ns view dow our ed and forc ups rein the y all onl with ner adventure ry, Michael White, Robert vre in such a man place. Bamberger, Debbie Har and mundanity. In oeu m first ticis the in scep rest by ed rs who inte inat his d dom cite ld soli wor ly in a had correct tis… to name a few. The partne admit being addicted we still rolling my Fox , Simon Cur are ude dice incl the es pag and e on, s thes of goe t backgammon, the only game I can er The pap sustain the cos for sustainable victory, for their faith have helped us tram in Tris ies pan and k com Nic k test than grea bly to, luck is an essential ingredient the of hum e average, way. I from the first issue som on – one side no r to you rest on inte ci, dice of the Guc and e Chanel, IWC, so when you hav love of all things mad the world. Thank you, Cartier, you must ride your and one game in three – I have learned etc. e us. lipp but k Phi even when playing a d-building tool, a Armani, Pate – and good fortune to the very limit, I am often asked if FQR is a bran ks to Tom, Vicki, Emilia, Tiffany than cial ning Spe grin lly ch erfu Fin che her is furt to who ed nt ceiv one con opp tly an lian ng bril faci e gam marketing device dson to all who believe. ch, me, my wife, my Labrador Hu Fin away, certain of victory. rs, tne Par & a is the being at all ld-domination projects I have on That Finch’s Quarterly came into wrist or any other wor my no held s ly, god rter The Qua . h’s luck Finc d for goo no “reason” manifestation of ded me a go. There was I han as g une lon fort as and for , so dice be the will ed and toss one day as I master plan. It is as it is, tly uen seq sub elf mys and r , lkes to conside chance meeting with Nick Fou e the fortune to be lucky enough gh, and then with hav hau il committed to ston unt e her littl Fet n mea tram rds Tris Wo with Nick’s friend. . them nd arou tners team the and to action. The friends and par Patrick Fetherstonhaugh, Nick, paper and then by pted and – ado us elf mys with y find rne to g on this jou To have the fortune and who have come alon ght insi h suc with st arti and a brilliant writer

T

one: h p e tel 2 957 4 8 7 0173

Winter 2011

21

www.finchsquarterly.com

Finch & Co

Downton Abbey, Uptown Steeds As a backdrop to the Highclere Yearling parades, “Downton Abbey” is perfection. But, says Harry Herbert, the horses are the stars of this show

B

ritish horseracing is opening its doors, lifting its skirts. At last, recognition has dawned on the sport that after centuries cloaking itself in mystique, the public demand is for something in which they can engage.

The 19th renewal of the Highclere Yearling parades in late October takes place on the estate of Highclere Castle, which has recently been made famous by the phenomenally successful TV series Downton Abbey playing on our screens. Sunday-evening showings may have won the ratings war but the Highclere Yearling Parades, I would like to think, are one of the hotter tickets in racing.

The authentic attractions of this unique fixture on the sportsman’s racing calendar are the bluebloods that will graduate to form the class of 2012, carrying our own well-known light and dark blue colours of Highclere Thoroughbred Racing. My brother-in-law, John Warren, and I scour the thoroughbred world for the yearlings that will be shown at these parades.

It is here that the old racing adage about dreaming that one’s geese are swans is put to its first test for, though more than 60 per cent of shares in Highclere syndicates are sold prior to the parades, they are vital in sustaining the business.

Over the four days 800 guests cast their eyes on hopefully the next Harbinger (World Champion 2010) or Motivator (Epsom Derby Winner 2005) or Petrushka (European Champion Filly 2000) – big names among the galaxy of stars exhibited over the years in the lush and sylvan setting of Highclere.

The invitation to view, at the culmination of the world’s leading thoroughbred Sales, is a coveted one.

Invitees will never know whether they are there as “hotpots” or likely purchasers who have put their names forward as syndicate members as readily as they put their children up for the appropriate school; or among those who it is hoped will be seduced by a luxury transformed into a necessity. As an object of desire, a gleaming thoroughbred becomes irresistible.

Cheque books at the ready? Well, the sumptuous post-parade lunch is on the house (rather than on the Castle) but the accompanying fine wines are there to celebrate the purchase of shares rather than provoke them and, actually, most decisions are made before lunch.

In these straitened times you might wonder at the sanity of an enterprise such as Highclere, risking fortunes at the Sales before devising what amounts to a catwalk for what are admittedly superlative young pretenders. But in this most seductive of atmospheres, self-indulgence is no sin. In this most exclusive of organisations all are equal, if those who eventually join are justifiably more equal than others.

Back in our first year of 1992 we showed five yearlings to 100 people who eventually whittled down to fill the 30 syndicate places. One of the five was Lake Coniston, who turned into a champion sprinter and was sold for over £2m having cost just 22,000 guineas.

We were up and running. The acceleration since then has been phenomenal and last year we presented 20 yearlings in 12 syndicates; this year will be similar.

Anh Understanding

Artist Anh Duong distils her emotions in self-portraits, which ask the viewer whether they are really, truly seeing

It is a huge production (though not quite as big as Downton Abbey), and it could not be achieved without my Highclere team. The parades are part of a package. We want them to be informative, educative and colourful. The environment is right, and John and I swap anecdotes about the sales, while he switches on the light regarding the finer points of each yearling. It’s a formula that has persuaded many a hesitant racing partisan to consider his or her future enjoyment of the racing game is worth more than counting beans.

John, universally acknowledged as among the finest judges of a horse, is the man who sees “not with, but through the eye” of future champions of the turf when they are no more than skittish infants – think trying to predict whether or not Usain Bolt in his nappies would be the fastest man on the planet.

The pick of the crop don’t come cheap. The most expensive yearling of this year’s Newmarket’s October Yearling Sales was a filly by pre-eminent stallion Galileo who went for a cool 1.7m guineas: average prices were up 25 per cent on last year’s 107,445gns; the turnover exceeded £48m. The daughter of my mare Model Queen, which I share with John, fetched half a million, which led to floods of tears from our wives.

At the parades you are invited, oh so genteelly, to consider the possibilities of money well spent. Had you availed yourself of a portion of the best horse in the world in 2010, Harbinger, a standout at the 2007 parade, the returns were life-changing. On his premature retirement through injury it took a king’s ransom for the Japanese to secure him, in the face of stiff international competition. ollowing the parades, the yearlings are broken in under the eye of John and my sister, Lady Carolyn, before being sent to their appointed trainers. We match trainer with horse and it is good to have them at the parades so the owners can familiarise and fraternise. If only shareholders could be matched with the right horse: a fiery precocious colt with a thrusting hedge fund manager; a slinky filly with a football superstar member with an ambition (such as his own) to cheer home an Ascot Gold Cup winner.

There are birds of every feather.

Highclere is the upper end of syndicate ownership.

In 2010 standings in the British owners’ prize money league showed Highclere fourth, behind Khalid Abdullah, Godolphin and Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed Al Maktoum, son of Sheikh Mohammed.

Racing is a very expensive sport; you cannot get away from that. However, we can make it more costeffective for people and also help them to get their toe into the water. Managing expectations is always difficult, but with all the effort that has gone into buying them, you have to be hopeful.

If Downton Abbey is a daydream of past Edwardian opulence, Highclere Thoroughbred Racing offers a vision of the future. Anticipation is sometimes said to be preferable to realisation. I would like to think that, with Highclere, you have a more than reasonable chance of experiencing the delights of both.

Harry Herbert is FQR’s Racing Correspondent.

F

I

started to paint as a child as a necessity – to express autobiographical moments, but the images do not all the things I couldn’t say. When childhood represent literal memories. Instead, it is a dialectical seemed chaotic and felt like a dangerous place, I game with the mirror image, creating a space where would spend hours alone in my room making these emotions can be analysed and processed in paint. little drawings of my inner world. Art became centre Every work of an artist is a self-portrait. I am more stage for all my emotions, where it was safe to feel them. conscious of that process than most. The subject No need to say, no need to share. Where everything matter disappears through repetition. was possible. I would draw these little dolls in beautiful I started this group of paintings at the end of my clothes living a beautiful life, a life that seemed far from marriage. They are about relationships. They are reach. Yet the expressions about emotions. They are on their faces seemed about distance. In these already haunted. works of self-portraiture, In 1989 I was I use images of myself spending the summer in varying poses – both at the Warhol estate in clothed and unclothed Montauk. I had fallen – as staging grounds for in love with a painter an emotionally charged and had just moved to internal discourse New York. On the verge on relationships and of ending a modelling the power of “playing career, I was looking for dress-up”. my next journey. I had all In these self-portraits these desires to express the subject is nothing in myself through art, but itself. What matters is all I still wasn’t sure what that can be said about life art form I was going to via the subject. Staring embark on. stripped bare in the Immersed in the mirror to forget myself. vibrating art world of the In painting that face late Eighties, I decided to over and over. Where pick up the brushes again one can be moved by and started to paint my the illusion that a blue friends. Then one day my creates when meeting an model didn’t show up. ochre. If one line could Frustrated, I decided from say everything, I would then on that I would be like to stop there. I don’t my own model. After all, want to describe things I had spent many years but reveal them. being a muse, and I could I paint to keep my trust I would always be on sanity because I cannot This time you don't have to leave, 2010, oil time and available. express it another way.

After many years of on canvas, 85 x 45 inches Each mark attached to a practising holding back moment of my life. from expressing my feelings, I wasn’t even sure These paintings exude a sense of perfection in myself how I felt and as I turned the mirror towards the appearance: the clothes are chosen carefully, as me a whole world was about to be revealed. are the bags and the shoes. But in the solitude of the Once again, it was through painting that I was able boudoir, she is perfectly poised only to find herself to reconnect. I was able to see through the mirror. I abandoned, boxed in the frame of the canvas as if it was able to express the lost emotions. has become the limits that one can cross. These selfSince then I have painted self-portraits on portraits are staring back at you saying, “Can you a daily basis as a form of diary, and my work truly see me?” They are looking at themselves, jailed suggests an ongoing personal narrative or a record in their own reflection. of a psychological journey. The emotional and You can explain art as much as you want but, compositional centre of these paintings is the eyes. ultimately, you have to feel it. It is the experience of They gaze directly out of the paintings at the viewer being moved and, in that sensation, one feels alive. with an inscrutable expression that could suggest I would hope that people looking at these selfuncertainty, vulnerability, longing – or none of portraits will see passages of their own lives. these – but there is always an underlying resilience Sonnabend Gallery, 536 West 22nd Street, and power. The face is blank and empty of affect, but New York, is exhibiting 14 new paintings by there is a suggestion of raw emotion under this mask Anh Duong until 22 December 2011 www.

The paintings arise from interior emotions and anhduongart.com; www.sonnabendgallery.com

Any Time, Any Place…

Francis Russell says when it comes to sightseeing, seize the day

S

ome years ago, the Italian publisher Umberto Allemandi asked me to write a small book of brief essays about the 50 places in his country that mean most to me. 52 Italian Places: A Pocket Grand Tour was issued in both English and Italian editions in 2007. The purpose of the book was to offer a selection not only of the most celebrated sights in Italy, but also of somewhat less familiar ones, and thus in turn to help the visitor to clarify his or her own priorities. The text was mine, the opinions and, perhaps, the prejudices were mine; but I was not responsible for the illustrations. Reviews were generous, and encouraged me to prepare a somewhat larger companion on Turkey, using some of the several thousands of photographs I had taken over many years of monuments in the Near East. Places in Turkey was published by Frances Lincoln in 2010. Places in Syria followed in February this year, and Places in Jordan appears next February.

In all four books, I follow a notional circuit. With Italy this begins at Turin, which until the age of flying was a natural point of departure for both British and French tourists, and ends at Monreale, above Palermo.

For Turkey, Syria and Jordan, where most visitors arrive at Istanbul, Damascus and Amman, these are the starting points While I have been in Italy 150 or more times, I have only made 18 visits to Turkey and half a dozen each to both Syria and Jordan. But I am a tolerably efficient sightseer, armed with the most authoritative guidebooks and the best available maps. Turkey is a vast country, and, of course, there are places

www.finchsquarterly.com

I have as yet to see – classical Addada, medieval Rum Kale and the newly discovered ancient shrine near Urfa, for example, not to mention the Armenian monastery at Albayrak so tantalisingly out of reach in a military outpost. Similarly, in Syria it is almost impossible to get to Byzantine Burqush near the Lebanese border, but on the other hand the secret police have been attentive enough to tell me that I have overshot a turn in thick fog. In Jordan attitudes are more relaxed, although getting to some of the remoter sites can be a logistical exercise.

Inevitably, my selection of places – and of buildings or works of art within these – reflects my own interests. For Italy, where the patterns of successive civilisations lie more thickly than in any area of comparable size, the challenge was to offer a balanced microcosm, a microcosm that reflected the fact that more visitors go to Italy to see masterpieces of the Renaissance, for example, than to look at, let us say, neoclassical or 19th-century monuments, still less those of the last century that I am ill qualified to judge. Sacrifices had to be made. Pisa was omitted, as I love Pistoia and Lucca more; yet space was found for little-known Atri. The Veneto, Tuscany and Umbria, a particular love, were squeezed, to make room for Apulia and other less visited areas.

With Turkey, the challenge was slightly different, to balance the great classical and Byzantine and Islamic sites. I could have included well over 100 classical towns alone, but these have been covered by others. I include many, but not all, of the most celebrated – Aspendus, Xanthus, Ephesus or Pergamum – but at Ephesus I draw attention to the little-visited

22

southern stretch of the wall, and at Pergamum to the Amphitheatre and the Aqueduct, which are also off the tourist trail. Of the major sites I love particularly Selge, Termessus and Heraclea: these, of course, appear, but so do the less familiar favourites Istlada, Hoyran and Loryma. And while I would hate to think that their magic is disturbed by mass tourism, it gives me pleasure to think that others may be encouraged to visit them. Other places need to be seen soon, not least Hasankeyf, the most dramatic early-Islamic site in Turkey, which is due to be submerged when a controversial dam is completed.

One of the lessons of our times is that sightseeing opportunities have to be seized. Within weeks of the appearance of my book on the country the Syrian troubles began. Thus far these have not, it seems, impinged on that country’s extraordinary inheritance but will, alas, discourage the measured tourism that might otherwise contribute to the maintenance of many vulnerable buildings. It would be particularly regrettable if tourism is affected in Syria’s neighbour Jordan. Petra really is one of the wonders of the world, and the country has so much else for the sightseer, from the ancient slag heaps of the Wadi Feinan and the uniquely well-preserved Roman fort at Bshir, to the “desert castles” of the Umayyads. And the beauty of the landscape is inexorable.

Francis Russell is the Deputy Chairman of Christie’s UK, where he has been a specialist for over 30 years and a well-known authority in the field of Italian Old Masters. His latest book, Places in Syria: A Pocket Grand Tour (Frances Lincoln Publishers Ltd), was published earlier this year

Winter 2011

FQR Theatre Special

THE BEST JOB IN SHOW BUSINESS… NOW WOULD SOMEONE PLEASE GIVE ME A F**KING HORSE! As he tours the world as “Dick the Shit”, Kevin Spacey rediscovers and relates the wonder of the theatre – and revels in the delights of sharing Shakespeare with his close-knit company

I

think it’s a combination – of the drums, the rhythm, the energy, the forward momentum, drive and trajectory toward its conclusion – that has made doing Richard III (or Dick the Shit, as I call him) such an energising and satisfying experience.

To the outsider, it must seem a gruelling schedule.

As I write, we have just completed 111 performances, and are now slightly less than halfway through our world tour of Sam Mendes’ final production for The Bridge Project – a collaboration between The Old Vic, BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music) and Neal Street Productions.

The discussions started some three years ago, when Sam and I decided on tackling Richard III. The process of putting it together began in earnest last February.

After three months of training (the physical demands of the role are crazy), two months learning the text and six weeks of rehearsal, we opened our modern production of one of William Shakespeare’s earliest plays (written at the age of about 28) at The Old Vic in London in late June. Between then and 5 March 2012 we will have played close to 198 performances on 12 different stages, in 12 different cities across three continents.

Ode to Nodding Frog If I talk of frogs You, who laugh so easily, Cry… If I talk of frogs As no one does…

It is my reason why.

So… On a lily Large and frilly, Sits my friend the frog.

At night he serenades the Colonel’s dreams, Of battles and war machines.

By day he moves not, And says not what His frog mind wants to say.

He has no friend to hear, No love left to yearn, No reason for alarm.

It’s as it always is, this pond, This world of balanced beings A cacophony of sad frog songs at dark And silent remorse by light This since the frog lost his love, his one delight.

She leaped off high, To dance on the speckled lake With the toads and terrapins And flies.

He’s better off the frog, told himself As the Colonel had too.

A heart so small might shatter Into a million glass specks Over such a sad matter.

So he sits as he always has, His frog mouth slightly ajar While she dances afar.

The wind tickles his Spotted neck As I have touched yours And he edges into the dark water Submerged from all The pounding of his heart rings in the ears to call To you all who hear And care About my friend the frog.

Winter 2011

of accomplishment, of striving for something as a team – like in sports: we get to kick, toss, bunt, hit, throw, volley and slam the extraordinary words of Shakespeare from country to country, citizen to citizen – whether they speak English as a first language or not.

And the response, the attentive pull, the laughter and the storytelling, has transcended borders, cultures, languages and expectations. I will probably never have another experience that lets me know what it might feel like to be Mick Jagger, but this timeless 16th-century play is being received like it’s a rock star. or this company of actors it’s been like a call to duty. It is clear to me at every performance – as I watch from the stage and listen from behind it, to the reaction that my fellow actors are getting from our audiences – that I do not do this alone. While I get a great deal of attention, Richard III is not a solo act, but a company effort. We have met it together. It is the spirit of adventure, of common purpose, even a belief in the romance of the living theatre that gives all of us in this company a sense of mission. We all feel like we are going somewhere. Surely we know the impact we are having, stirring in audiences a sense of wonder about the theatre, the exciting prospect of deliverance from not just the mundane banalities of so many other forms of “entertainment” but to something we’ve all known – a reach for and promise of great work being tackled in epic ways by a group of like-minded artists spreading the spirit and proving the living theatre as a vibrant, inspiring and important form of expression around the world.

While it is good to be the King, it’s only good on stage – for backstage and off-stage, I am a company man and lucky as hell to be a member of this company. And so my thanks and gratitude go to my fellow members: Maureen Anderman, Stephen Lee Anderson, Jeremy Bobb, Nathan Darrow, Jack Ellis, Haydn Gwynne, Chuk Iwuji, Isaiah Johnson, Gemma Jones, Andrew Long, Katherine Manners, Howard Overshown, Simon Lee Phillips, Gary Powell, Mike Rudko, Annabel Scholey, Gavin Stenhouse, Hannah Stokely and Chandler Williams. They are the best, and have made this the most significant theatrical experience of my life. And to think we’ve only just started. Beijing, Singapore, Sydney, Australia, Doha and Brooklyn, New York… get ready. Because the tornado is coming to town.

Maybe somewhere along the way someone will finally give me the horse I keep screaming about.

Kevin Spacey is Artistic Director of The Old Vic Theatre Company. He also founded The Kevin Spacey Foundation to support young actors, writers, directors and producers (kevinspaceyfoundation.com). In 2010, Spacey was honoured with a CBE for services to the theatre

F

Cast of Richard III in San Francisco The role of Richard III is the second-longest role, after Hamlet, in Shakespeare’s entire canon. He clearly wrote it, I suspect, before his leading actors began to complain to him; for out of 26 scenes in this play, Richard is on stage for and driving 23 of them. Which means that there isn’t much time when the character is off-stage. I’m certain that Shakespeare’s actors must have cornered him and begged him for a costume change, a few scenes where other events happen. And he evidently listened and learned, as he applied the technique of keeping his leading character off-stage for periods of time in his later plays. But Richard III exposes us to a young playwright who had not yet applied the practical realities of performance. What it takes and what it asks from the actor playing Richard is something akin to riding a tornado.

I started by saying that to the outsider ours must seem a gruelling schedule. And it is for the insider as well. Following a 12-week run at The Old Vic, where we closed on 11 September, we opened in Hong Kong on 16 September. Then we had five performances in Avilés, Spain; four in Naples; six in Istanbul, as well as three at the 14,000-seat ancient Greek theatre at Epidaurus, about two hours’ drive from Athens.

Packing, unpacking, cars to airports, flights, different hotels, different climates, air-conditioned theatres and those that are not; opening nights, speeches, events, cocktail receptions, fight rehearsals, photo calls, tech rehearsals, dress rehearsals… in every city!

I write as we finish up a two-week run at the Curran Theatre in San Francisco. After several months of playing to foreign audiences, it was wonderful to play in front of American audiences. The Curran was a special venue for us theatre rats, as it is also known to

Understanding human emotion and an ear for language are the signs of a good director as well as of a great poet. Julian Sands is honoured to have worked with both

be where all the theatre scenes in All About Eve were shot. It’s lucky for us that there are no ambitious types in our company waiting to sabotage from the wings.

Indeed, what makes this experience both memorable and remarkable are the people I’m sharing it with. Sam did a fantastic job casting together a group of 20 actors; half American, half British – and we have become what one can only hope to become in this kind of circumstance – a dedicated and close family. We have actors playing multiple roles, women playing men, most had to learn drumming, nearly all play soldiers to both King Richard and Richmond, many understudy other roles and have had to go on when illness or injury have struck one of our cast. And everyone has been ready.

We inspire each other and bring out the best in each other. So I am fortunate to walk out on all these stages with a group of performers I admire, enjoy, laugh with, play with, challenge and am challenged by. I feel completely supported by the ethos that drives all of us as a unit. We also have a dozen or so crew – stage management, company managers, lighting, sound, video and costume technicians and musicians – who are travelling with us. As well as four different sets, so that one is always on the move somewhere in the world. In addition to the three hours we spend on stage each night, we also spend so much time off-stage that this will go down as one of the best experiences I have ever had. The depth of my love for this company is boundless, and I know I couldn’t do what I do without them.

What makes it all so special is that we are all in it together. We are all focused. We all have a goal. We all aspire to be as great as we can be. There is a sense

Direct Action

to the poems’ language – its humour, passion, intelligence and its power.

People are astonished by the love poems in particular. Their tender and beautiful sentiments, expressed with such ver the past year, I have worked with two clarity and economy, are a revelation to great but very different directors: John many. My favourite poem is It Is Here ( for Malkovich and David Fincher. John A) because it is a complete statement on directed me in A Celebration of Harold Pinter, a the transcendental power and endurance one-man show featuring Harold Pinter’s poetry of love. also had the privilege of working and prose. I heard of his poetry six years before with another very gifted man, David he died, when he asked me to present a recital on Fincher, on his latest film, The Girl with his behalf due to his advancing illness. He had the Dragon Tattoo, which will be released written poems throughout his life, but of course this December. It is an adaptation of the was best known as a playwright. I read the poems first novel in Stieg Larsson’s bestselling and immediately loved the language and the Millennium trilogy. The story follows a dynamic experience of speaking them out loud murder enquiry brought about by an old – their spare but complex structures, their depth man, played by Christopher Plummer, who and intensity are tremendously thrilling. gives a journalist an assignment to find After his death, I was in LA and repeated the out what happened to his niece during the recital as a memorial tribute. I peppered it with Sixties. During the film there are various reflections, thoughts, extracts from obituaries flashbacks to the Sixties, and I play the old and anecdotes as a tribute to him. People loved man in his younger years. it. John heard about it and said he wanted to What a fantastic experience it was develop the recital into a theatre piece. He agreed working with David. Here is a director to work with me, help shape the content and who has mastered his technical medium, structure and demonstrate that a man in a pool filmmaking, but who also understands of moonlight could be a compelling theatrical human emotions and how to get the most experience to watch.

Julian Sands at the Charles Finch and Chanel Pre-Oscar Party out of his actors.

John is a great friend so we have a very Julian Sands is a renowned British easy shorthand but, more importantly, he is actor. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, enormously talented, has a great deal of theatre directed by David Fincher and starring experience and a fabulous ear for language. He re-examined the poems word by word, moment by also had direct contact with Harold himself during moment, reassessing their content and intention. Daniel Craig, is in cinemas from 21 December in the recording of his play Old Times for the BBC. We John was like a conductor, helping me give expression the US, the UK from 26 December

O

I

23

www.finchsquarterly.com

Quarterly FQR Review Report

Camilla Belle Pre-Oscar Party urman Uma Th Party ar sc Pre-O

cy Claire Danes & Hugh Dan Pre-Oscar Party

Hugh Gra nt Chucs Ser pentine C harity

Swimathon

Arki Busson Swimathon Chucs Serpentine Charity

Ginnifer Goodwin & Rashida Jones Pre-Oscar Party

Emma Stone Pre-Oscar Party

Juliette Lewis Pre-Oscar Party

Boris & Lilly Becker Swimathon Chucs Serpentine Charity

January Jones Pre-Oscar Party

Isabel Lucas Pre-Oscar Party

tt cDermo Dylan M Party ar Pre-Osc

Patrick Grant Swimathon Chucs Serpentine Charity

Drew Barrymore Pre-Oscar Party

Tim Jeffries FQR Filmmakers Di nner in Cannes

Jamie Campbell Bo Chucs Serpentin wer & Bonnie Wright e Charity Swim athon

Marisa Tomei Pre-Oscar Party

Naomi Watts Pre-Oscar Party

Valerie Tian FQR Venice Dinner

Gadon & Sarah e fo a D Willem ice Dinner n FQR Ve

Camilla Rutherford Chucs Serpentine Charity Swimathon

h & Charles Finc Karine Martin er nn Di FQR Venice

Martin & Caroline Scheufele, Karine ice Dinner Ven R FQ an ssm Edward R Pre

Claire Ingle-Finch & Jonath an Sanders FQR Dinner for the Premie re of A Dangerous Method

www.finchsquarterly.com

Viggo M o FQR D rtensen in Method ner for the Prem iere

Zygi & Eugenie Kamasa FQR Dinner for the Premiere of A Dangerous Method

don arah Ga lger & S r o B h ra Sa ne nice Din FQR Ve

of A Da ngerous

24

Winter 2011

Quarterly FQR Review Report

ick Foulkes stonhaugh & N Tristram Fether nnes Ca in er s Dinn FQR Filmmaker

Mick Jagger & Diego Della Valle FQR Filmmakers Dinner in Cannes

Jane Fonda FQR Filmmakers Dinner in Cannes

nch in & Charles Fi Harvey Weinste in Cannes er nn Di s er ak FQR Filmm

Max Irons & Em ily FQR Filmmaker Browning s Dinner in Cann es

Fnch’s Quarterly Re view Summer Issue

Georges Kern & Ch Thomas with an arles Finch present Jeremy IW FQR Filmmaker C Portuguese Automatic s Dinner in Cann es

Johnny Pigozzi in Cannes FQR Filmmakers Dinner

Mads Mikkelsen FQR Filmmakers Dinner in Cannes

Vanessa Hudgens FQR Filmmakers Dinner in Cannes

Jeremy Thomas & Mia Wasikow ska FQR Filmmaker s Dinner in Cann es

Emma Watson r Pre-Bafta Dinne

Aisha & James Caan FQR Filmmakers Dinner in Cannes

írez dgar Ram

&É rthington Sam Wo inner aD Pre-Baft

Noomi Rapace Pre-Bafta Dinner

Evgeny Lebedev Pre-Bafta Dinner

Sophie Dymoke & Matthew Goo de Pre-Bafta Dinne r

gle-Finch Sydney In inner aD Pre-Baft

Tracey Emin Pre-Bafta Dinner

Talulah Riley r Pre-Bafta Dinne

Eric Fellner & La ura Bailey Pre-Bafta Dinne r

Winter 2011

Lillian von Stauffenberg Pre-Bafta Dinner

Paloma Faith Pre-Bafta Dinner

Rosamund Pike Minnie Driver & r Pre-Bafta Dinne Bob Geldof & Mariella Frostrup Pre-Bafta Dinner

25

y Darren Aronofsk r ne in D ta af e-B Pr

Thandie Newton Pre-Bafta Dinner

Kevin Spacey & Tom Hooper Pre-Bafta Dinne r

www.finchsquarterly.com

Fabrizio Zangrilli - King of the Shoulder K2 - in Chucs on K2

LIVE WELL • STAND TALL • GIVE FREELY • EXPLORE OFTEN • LIVE WELL • STAND TALL •

• LIVE WELL • STAND TALL • GIVE FREELY • EXPLORE OFTEN • LIVE WELL • STAND TALL •

LIVE WELL • STAND TALL • GIVE FREELY • EXPLORE OFTEN •

LIVE WELL • STAND TALL • GIVE FREELY • EXPLORE OFTEN

FQR Automotive Special

I

n 1977, Smokey and the Bandit wasn’t just a narrative feature. For me, Bandit was a documentary. What a movie! And, better yet, what a car…

I was a young boy growing up in Virginia, and Bandit appealed to the intrinsic Southern spirit of rebelliousness and flouting of authority (my great-great-grandfather was a general in the Confederacy). The film is essentially one long, redneck car chase, defying The Man, with 100 police cars laid to waste. (“Smokey” is trucker parlance for policeman.)

The Bandit, played by a be-wigged Burt Reynolds, is a legendary moonshine runner.

He’s given the difficult task of diverting the heat off a convoy of Big Rigs transporting beer across the Georgia Stateline. What seems like a suicide mission – outracing police cars and jumping downed bridges – is made easier by the fact that The Bandit has a secret weapon: the supercharged muscle car that will forever be known as “The Bandit Trans Am”.

Rolled out in 1977, the Pontiac Trans Am Special Edition was the last great car ever made in the USA. If you were to ask people to name their favourite American car of the past 30 years – or if they’ve actually owned an American car at all, the response always draws a blank. The US auto industry was once an omnipotent force that gave us the 1955 Thunderbird and 1966 Corvette.

Today, subsidised by government bailouts, the industry barely stays afloat, peddling mid-size trucks and minivans – a far cry from the brash and innovative Detroit that designed a car as brilliant as the Trans Am in the late Seventies.

To behold this beast is to behold art: sensuous, menacing lines; “Starlight Black” paint job with a gold phoenix covering the hood; “Trans Am” in gold gothic lettering on the front fenders and rear spoiler; gold accented honeycomb wheels; the remarkable T TOP – a roof with removable tinted-glass panels that makes driving with the top open pleasurable… and safe; and a plush, Naugahyde interior, with a gold prismic dashboard that reflects light like a kaleidoscope.

It’s as if a horny 12-year-old boy was asked to design an “awesome” car.

In the film I directed, Ultrasuede: In Search of Halston, I examine the rise and fall of one of the Seventies’ greatest and most decadent fashion

designers: Halston, an American icon who had the flair of a gay Hugh Hefner, and the destructive genius of Basquiat. As the presenter/interlocutor of the documentary, a Virgil taking us through the nine rings, I needed an appropriate chariot to move me through the film. We were scheduled to shoot Harold Koda, head of the Met’s Costume Institute, when an idea hit me: what about pulling up a motherfuckin’ ’77 Trans Am in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art? Cinematic gold.

So, like a middle-aged beardo coveting the dream car of his youth, I bought one.

The car doesn’t drive as fast I like. It outputs a measly 180hp, has the low rumbling of an idling shrimp trawler and handles like a shopping cart.

But the reaction this thing gets from usually jaded New Yorkers is stunning: tons of “thumbs up”; Italian tourists having their pictures taken with it; girls wondering what kind of douche bag would drive such an odd car. And I think the car – visually at least, works in the film. It’s everything right and wrong about the Seventies: daring, outrageous and silly, from an era we can never recapture… as much as we try. It also has zero to do with anything about Halston, who most likely found the car terribly gauche, but so what? They both reached their zenith around the same time, and both embraced glittering gold.

The last scene of the film is my character burning rubber and peeling off in Times Square into the neon sunset. After we got the shot I was pulled over by the NYPD Traffic Division, and charged with reckless driving and public endangerment.

Hardly the outlaw Bandit of yore, but made it all worthwhile nonetheless.

In 2010, after years of steady decline, General Motors eliminated Pontiac, and the Trans Am along with it. It was an ignoble ending to a vaunted line. But if anyone’s inspired, a custom shop in Georgia makes the “Burt Reynolds Trans Am”.

For over $130,000, you can get a Nascar-calibre engine and suspension under the classic ’77 chassis. Or, if you want something cheaper, you could please buy mine, now the irony and novelty has completely worn off…

Whitney Sudler-Smith is a filmmaker. His latest film Ultrasuede: In Search of Halston will be out on DVD in the UK on November 7, and opening in theatres in the USA on December 29

Bound For Muscle When it comes to cars, Whitney Sudler-Smith shows his muscle… and tells the tale of the rise and fall of an iconic American car

has the low rumbling of an idling shrimp trawler and handles like a shopping cart

I

Ageing Well Turin’s recently renovated National Automobile Museum holds a fascinating collection of cars that speaks to

Allegra Donn of true, unadorned history Winter 2011

taly is widely celebrated for its sense of style, its curvy women, and exquisite automobiles. The Turin Auto Museum makes clear that the three spring from the same source. The museum, moreover, presents a large proportion of its ageing beauties without restoration, allowing the patina of their bodies and the softly worn leather of their interiors to present their life histories unadorned by the restorative surgeon. The diversity of the Turin collection’s stupefyingly original automobiles is the museum’s strength and does justice to Italy’s most prestigious export.

From 1861 to 1865, Turin was the capital of a reunited Italy.

Fiat was founded there in 1899, making it a car capital of the world, alongside Detroit and Wolfsburg. Now, more than a century later, following a four-year restoration project costing €33m, the architect Cino Zucchi and set designer François Confino, have created an enticing giro for the visitor, including a reproduction of the world’s first self-propelled vehicle, a steam cart, invented by Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot in 1769.

The museum explores the motor car in its varied roles and purposes: wondrous object; means of locomotion; status symbol; even changes in the fortunes of society and, almost always, the dreams and aspirations of men, the unquenchable desire for speed, to measure himself against others – the desire to impress or intimidate.

Each of the museum’s cars has its own story to tell: the steam carriage designed by Virginio Bondino in 1854; the first fourwheeled Benz model of 1893, with motor-belt gearbox, and the Fiat 4 HP from 1899, or the 1909 Itala owned by Queen Margherita, which she nicknamed “Palombella”, and the Renault Fiacre from 1910 – the car that taxied French soldiers to the front during the Great War, saving Paris from German invasion.

And what of the story resting in the legendary Itala driven

by Prince Scipione Borghese in the 1907 Peking–Paris rally, accompanied by his faithful mechanic-butler Ettore Guizzardi and Corriere della Sera war correspondent Luigi Barzini Sr, in the days when passports weren’t necessary for crossing borders?

Borghese disliked Barzini, and rarely addressed him directly.

When the three dined alone in the Gobi desert, he would tell Guizzardi to ask Barzini if he wanted seconds. When they arrived in Moscow, however, they all shared the enthusiastic welcome of the crowds lining the streets, who had read all about the Itala’s extraordinary adventures. The Itala finally made it to Paris in 60 days – weeks ahead of the other contestants. The automobile still bears its scars from the 9,317-mile journey. The

27

car is massive, truck-like, with two fuel tanks on either side and the leather seats shaped as though the three men have just got out. It is like seeing the brush strokes of the great painters on their canvases.

The stunning navy-blue Isotta Fraschini 8A made in 1929 by the defunct Italian car manufacturer was immortalised in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard. It rivalled the Rolls-Royce and was the luxury car brand that was much favoured by Hollywood stars and Chicago mobsters.

The museum also includes a small but outstanding collection of mostly Italian racing cars that takes your breath away.

The Alfa Romeo P2 designed by Vittorio Jano is incredibly important; only two models of this car survive in the world today – one in the Alfa Romeo collection and one here in the Museo dell’Automobile. Enzo Ferrari’s roots began running the Alfa racing team in the 1920s and 1930s and the P2, which along with its successors the P3 and the Tipo B, became the alldominate racers of the decade. The cigar-shaped Monaco Trossi was a revolutionary car, test driven at Monza in 1935, created by the engineer Augusto Monaco and Carlo Felice Trossi.

Other unmissables are the Ferrari 500 F2, the car in which Alberto Ascari became world champion in 1952 and 1953, the Fiat Turbina from 1954 – an experimental gas-turbineengined prototype – and the Mercedes W196, considered the most innovative Formula One car of its time, in which Fangio twice won the world title, and the Ferrari 156 from 1961, when Formula One championship regulations changed and the singleseater was being greatly altered.

There is also a sensational collection of Fiats that demonstrates just how advanced the company’s designs had been. The Fiat Multipla, presented in 1956, is a people carrier way ahead of its time.

The point of a museum is to preserve history; a restored anything loses it. The original leather of an old car has its story; restored leather is a blank page. The Turin Car Museum is exceptional because it houses a great number of unique automobiles that give you a sense of history. A beautifully maintained original car is unbeatable, loved and authentic. So, what’s more appealing – a naturally beautiful woman or the dolled-up, surgically enhanced version? The Turin Museum asks and helps to answer the question.

Allegra Donn has written for Italian Vogue, FT and The Times among others

www.finchsquarterly.com

A True Gin-tlem an

Mic 1. At A kael Perron

FQR Food and Drink

Obtaining the best-quality quinine for the tonic water produced by his company, FeverTree, can involve life and limb, says Tim Warrillow

I

n 2010 I was travelling across the Rwanda-Congo border. The first roadblock was just a bit of string stretched across the road by gunmen who wordlessly pointed for us to stop the car. My driver handed over money and we continued down the road.

The second roadblock looked more ominous. This time a plank of wood was slid out onto the road with six-inch nails hammered through it, hungry for fresh tyres. My driver hit the brakes in a cloud of dust.

When it cleared, we faced a gang of child soldiers, armed with AK-47s and a rocket launcher. Welcome to the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Central Africa is not high on many people’s lists of places to visit, and Congo is still struggling after decades of civil war and ethnic strife.

But the country has a huge amount of natural resources, and if my involvement with this ravaged state offers even the smallest contribution to its development, then that can only be a good thing, for here is obtained the finest quinine in the world.

The volatility of the region means running a business there is simply not attractive for larger corporations, many of which withdrew years ago.

But as Congo “grows” the finest quinine in the world, for me it was a no-brainer that my company, Fever-Tree, would source quinine for our tonic waters from the country.

Legend has it that the bark of the “fever tree” (the colloquial name for Cinchona Ledgeriana trees) was first used medicinally by the Spanish in the early 1630s, when it was given to the Countess of Chinchon. She’d contracted malaria while living in Peru and, when she recovered, news of the healing

Courtesy of Fever Tree

The Bark Is As Good As Its Bite

helps nnabel’s we s ’s Guide T en e o becaus hance the t r ve a G&T w Making Th aste. N e you ithout e Bes d a r cut gla t a sses es ink with you urally, the g straw, beca t G&T use t p la r e ss eye cia 2. You need s lly made for s first. The g must be perf he aroma u lasses trong , s by Jo filtered we use ectly clean, solid hn J wa are sig the bes ter. At Anna , plain ice – enkins. nature bel’s ou t brand and,

drink p

er

s of ice

mak

r water

is fi

if poss ible,

m e fe lt properties of the Cinchona tree spread.

3. Goo ctly chilled a r, Hoshizaki. ered and we ade from G d n u d o se q o i u But it wasn’t till the 1820s that Our m ality tonic w t will last long d ice helps ke one of a e e i t x p your e r. er rw quinine’s properties became world spring s are produ ill contribut ced e to wate renowned when officers of the British quality r, sugar cane with natura a great G&T. Army in India, in an attempt to ward off l b quinin and, m e. We ost im otanicals, tree be malaria, mixed the extract from the bark p u ortan s e ing Fe of the fever tree with sugar and water, Cincho the colloquia ver-Tree (fe tly: is the c na Ledgeria l name of t ver creating the first Indian Tonic Water; h ure for na tree 4 .

Wi , which e ma and then, to make it more palatable, is quit th so many laria). they surreptitiously added a little house e difficult to brands of g in choose gin to the mixture. The first London gin is Beefea one. A available, it t e , r w , G&T was born, and it soon a tA h ich is n c juniper ot alwa lassic Londo nnabel’s, ou a n d became the archetypal drink n r c y it s Gin, a dr y gin “ bouti rus with a c the case (it , made of the British Empire. r q h Hamm isp ue” gin as in er (500 b , dr y finish) a classic tas I spent a year 5. I th smith. t . o e I tt of a le l s s o in per bat researching in the ch) ma like Sipsmith wants k the perfect d it, e in a g G British Library, sourcing arage i fruits t with fresh le &T should n o enha b m e o g n ingredients for tonic a rnished or lime nce the One m . t Y b h ou can otanica e way ore ba water, and there I the rten ls o als twist a lemon der tip to e r ingredients o garnish wi guest found that fever trees th o n o u h essenc r se ance th e of th lime peel o descended from the e arom d to create th ther e v e c r it e a of th the gla ru A goo botanist Charles Ledger’s ss and e G&T gin. d gin s fruit. the rim a i n p s to d e r t s Cinchona Ledgeriana onic s on ord to extr h act the smile, ering it want ould be ser v variety were still in good s to e ed th existence in the heart of G&T t ser vice and njoy it. A w e way that a a s t t e h ank yo arm welcom the eve the war-torn Rwanda-Congo u will e, a Mickae n better. make l Perro border – the last remaining this n is the b plantation in the world. When I Annab ar manager at e l’ s bittertold my business partner, Charles orange Rolls, former CEO of Plymouth Gin, oils and what I had discovered, he told me that he marigold extracts, had contracted cerebral malaria in that region 20 so as to allow the gin’s years ago, and that it was the same quinine that had special botanicals to really shine through. saved his life. Serendipity?

Our early success was built with the support of Through adversity the sustainable plantation is prospering, having made a reputation for producing bartenders and sommeliers – and it even caught the finest natural quinine, still cultivated by the attention of Ferran Adrià at El Bulli in Spain, traditional methods, with the bark harvested by hand who developed a frozen Fever-Tree tonic soup. once the trees are eight years old (this is when the And last year, with Spain in mind, we launched our quinine is at its optimum). Fever-Tree supports this Mediterranean Tonic Water, the first tonic water remarkable plantation by using its highest-grade infused with lemon, thyme, rosemary and geranium. natural quinine in our Premium Indian Tonic Water, It creates a more delicate mixer with a softer Mediterranean Tonic Water, Premium Bitter Lemon bitterness – and works wonderfully on its own or with your favourite vodka or gin. and Lemon Tonic.

So now we’re stocked in seven out of the top 10 So is the variety and source of quinine just as important for tonics as grapes and soil are for restaurants in the world, with nine all-natural mixers in Bordeaux’s top wines? The answer is this: if you drink our award-winning range. But the underlying rationale the tonics solo, with ice, you will understand what a is simple: if three-quarters of your gin and tonic is the magical ingredient quinine can be. We go to the ends tonic water, then the quinine had better be good. of the earth – or at least the Rwanda/Congo border Tim Warrillow co-founded Fever-Tree in 2004, a – for our quinine as it’s purer, and has a higher ratio company creating mixers using natural and fresh of quinine to other alkaloids. Then, by using cane ingredients. In August Fever-Tree’s Ginger Beer sugar rather than saccharin as our sugar, we make and Mediterranean Tonic Water were both awarded a more delicate tonic and blend it with Tanzanian Gold Star Medals at the Great Taste Awards

Time To Stop Telling Porkies Tracy Worcester explains how a life-changing moment led to her new outlook on life, and to her making a documentary about the evils of factory pig farming

I

© Rex Features/IT V

have found my purpose in life: to be a flag-flyer for small-scale family farmers. But I haven’t always championed their survival. I started off as an actress. I was selfish and unfulfilled – waiting for people to say, “I saw you in a film or play and you were really good” – when actually the most fulfilling work is to serve others, not oneself. Obviously, the little breaks of success in my acting years were lovely and acting on stage is enormously fun. In truth, though, I didn’t really enjoy being an actress, and I’m now much happier serving a movement that is bigger than me and much more important.

I remember the moment it clicked. I was listening to a follower of Mahatma Gandhi at an event organised by Friends of the Earth.

He explained about the happiness of people who live as small-scale farmers with not a penny in the bank and how their self-sufficient life interconnected with their extended family, and community was free and fulfilling. However, life for small-scale farmers is increasingly difficult as they face stricter regulation and pressure to increase their size and economies of scale using more chemicals and machines in order to compete with cheap imports.

Alarmingly large factory farms are taking their place and the story that caught my eye was that of a

www.finchsquarterly.com

giant American, $12bn-turnover pig company. It had received generous loans and subsidies from EU taxpayers to set up a huge factory pig farm in eastern Europe.

Factory-farmed pigs live in intolerable conditions; crammed into small pens with slatted floors, mostly with no bedding, natural light or fresh air. To keep the pigs alive, they are subjected to regular doses of antibiotics and other medication. Toxic gases from intensive pig farms can cause workers and neighbours to suffer ailments such as respiratory and intestinal diseases; they also emit hydrogen sulphide, a gas that at high concentrations can lead to brain damage. The runoff from pig factories creates nutrient overload, causing huge fish kills in rivers, and manure runoff contaminates water with unhealthy levels of nitrates. So these factory farms are poisoning the land, the water and the air, and endangering our ability to treat diseases with antibiotics in the future.

I was shocked by this, and wanted to make people aware of where their pork was coming from. So in 2005/6 I started making a documentary called Pig Business. I went to Poland and interviewed people whose health had suffered from living nearby or working in these pig farms.

I tried in 2007 to sell the documentary but, initially, broadcasters were too afraid of litigation to distribute it. Then, in 2009 it was shown on More 4 and has now been shown on TV channels across the world, and can be accessed from our website. Earlier this year we commissioned an article by Dominic West about plans to build a giant pig farm on a greenfield site near the quiet rural village of Foston, Derbyshire.

I have also shown Pig Business in the House of Commons, the European Parliament and in the US Congress, Washington. At the EU Parliament screening I was told by the head of the animal welfare unit at the European Commission that the film will help the politicians understand that cheap meat isn’t cheap if you include all the costs to our health, environment and rural economy.

My small charity is just a tiny cog in the wheel for change, but we are creating a movement that has received incredible support from around the world. Small-scale, happy, sustainable family farmers that produce healthy, natural food are being destroyed in the name of

30

so-called free trade and competition. We have to recognise that obesity, heart disease, diabetes, the destruction of the rural economy, antibioticresistant diseases, E. coli, salmonella and the pig strain of MRSA are all caused by the way we mismanage our food production. We need a revolution, a farming revolution. There are many revolutions demanding justice in the Middle East, but they also need to happen here to shift our food economy from dependence on global banks and corporations to local, interconnected economies answering local, regional needs.

The Marchioness of Worcester is a former actress, environmental campaigner and film producer. For more information on her latest documentary, Pig Business; www.pigbusiness.co.uk

Winter 2011

I

n 1976 my father wanted to honour his recently deceased friend John Cranko by creating a ballet to Fauré’s Requiem. He had been strongly advised by the board of directors of the Royal Ballet not to do the ballet, that to use the Requiem would offend religious sensibilities. As was the case with some of his early works, the resistance of the board of directors to some of his subject matter or choice of music did not prevent him from pursuing other avenues. He went to Stuttgart Ballet instead, and created a deeply moving and profound statement of loss as well as evoking a balletic interpretation of spiritual transcendence.

In the middle of the ballet is a short solo; it came about after my father watched me dance, aged three, during a party in Stuttgart. I often accompanied my parents on tour or when he was invited to create a ballet abroad and, at the time, was obsessed with dancing – I suppose that, watching it day in, day out, how could I not be? The very next day my father recreated my steps on Marcia Haydée, principal dancer in the piece, and it’s an unsentimental, childlike prayer for eternal peace. In October, the Royal Ballet revived this piece and as an adult, nearly 20 years after my father’s untimely death, I am beginning to find it easier to watch his work.

Requiem was, and continues to be, a well-loved ballet. My father created around 90 works – mostly ballets – directed plays, and choreographed a couple of musicals. To date, his three-act ballet Manon has been performed by 22 companies around the world.

With success came the moments of crippling melancholy.

I was acutely aware from a young age that my father suffered in some way. Throughout his life, depression plagued him, and he managed it with various forms of medication. He would often find it hard to be fully present with me and my mother, and he would spend much of his downtime glued to the sofa watching mindless programmes on the television. However, what was admirable was that he always struggled his way out of his slumps and made it to a rehearsal; even when he was being treated for throat cancer or recovering from his first heart attack, he still made it his priority to stay working and to push himself even more.

Occasionally, I felt jealous of the amount of attention some of the dancers got from my father, particularly the ones who were dubbed his “muses”.

He saw in Darcey Bussell an attack and a strength that seemed otherworldly, and an ability that I think even she never knew she had – hence plunging her into the frightening challenge of having a brand-new three-act ballet created for her. At 19 she débuted in my father’s Prince of the Pagodas and stunned the world with her performance. I remember watching my father’s preoccupation with her, as I had done previously with Lynn Seymour, Alessandra Ferri and, latterly, Irek Mukhamedov, and feeling like I was losing out on something.

I now understand that my father regarded his dancers as tools and that perhaps he showed a rather

In Step With MacMillan Charlotte MacMillan still feels close to her father, the late and inspiring choreographer Kenneth MacMillan, 20 years after his untimely death

cavalier attitude to their feelings and ambitions, which were used up and discarded for the benefit of telling a story. These days, I watch dancers such as Edward Watson and I think how sad that he never worked with my father but, equally, how fortunate he is not to be another “victim of the auteur”; a dancer’s working life is short and marred by injury and is made even more complicated with the jostling for position as a choreographer’s favourite.

At the end of every working day, all my father wanted to do was to be at home with his wife and child, various dogs and his secret desire to knit. He made my mother and me some beautiful jumpers over the years, but we were never allowed to disclose his secret. I love it that he was different, eccentric and complicated because it is the side to my father that is reserved for me and my mother. When we talk of him it is still about his idiosyncrasies, and not so much of him being a “genius”, which is how he is often referred to now.

My father died suddenly in 1992, backstage at the Royal Opera House during a revival performance of his ballet Mayerling. I was 19 and out getting drunk with a friend. His death was melodramatic, theatrical for those who were in the audience the night he died. For my mother and myself, it was devastating and premature.

He was found alone, slumped in a corridor in a remote part of the Opera House having suffered major heart failure; a young wardrobe assistant found him.

Apparently, his eyes were open and he had an expression of surprise on his face.

I am told he would not have felt any pain, “the best way to go”. His death was announced on stage after the final standing ovation for Irek Mukhamedov’s performance in Mayerling. The audience was asked to leave in silence, and the only noise in the auditorium was the sound of the flip seats swinging shut accompanying the dancers’ sobs on stage. I am certain my father would have loved this scenario – perhaps he would even have tried to choreograph it into a ballet of his. e left his work in good order. His ballets are produced and taught immaculately by a team of people and year on year the demand for his work increases. It pleases me enormously to see his work performed by young dancers, many of whom emigrate to be in a company where his work is in repertoire. The audiences too seem to get more diverse; I was thrilled to be in an audience of a defunct concrete Bolshevik circus in Beijing amongst the locals eating their boxed noodles whilst watching Carlos Acosta and Sylvie Guillem perform my father’s Romeo and Juliet. That’s the beauty of dance: it transcends words and language, history and memory.

It is fresh and transient.

My father’s thoughts and personality live on in his work and, as his daughter, I still feel close to him 20 years on.

Charlotte MacMillan is a photographer. She has exhibited at City Hall, London and the Royal Opera House among others; www. charlottemacmillan.com

with success came the moments of crippling melancholy

H

Hardly Elementary, My Dear Watson

Edward Watson, principal dancer at The Royal Ballet, finds dancing the works of Kenneth MacMillan both physically and emotionally demanding – and totally rewarding

A

t the Royal Ballet School we grew up watching videos of Kenneth MacMillan’s Manon and Romeo and Juliet, and I guess that’s where my connection and fascination with his work started. It opened my eyes to dancers who seemed to be able to become characters beyond princes and princesses, and they appeared to be real people with real emotions who had no place in the fairytale world of ballet to which I’d previously been exposed. MacMillan, his ballets and his choice of dancers made me want to dance those stories in the way they danced them, immediately making me want to express thoughts and emotions and link them to every technical step I was taking.

As a student, I was never a naturally outgoing performer, but the idea of becoming someone else through just dancing seemed to bring out a much braver version of myself. MacMillan’s ballets are as much a part of the English style as Frederick Ashton’s and the big classical ballets, and I grew up through watching and learning how to adapt my technical knowledge to the physical and emotional demands of his ballets – even his most apparently abstract works seem to necessitate some emotional response.

www.finchsquarterly.com

MacMillan was in many ways a dramatist, whereas choreographers before him had tended to be the storytellers of their day, relating stories more about fairytales and fantasy. MacMillan challenged the ballet world by daring to comment on the human condition, the psyche and the complications of relationships. The fact that all this is depicted through dance and physical manipulation – actual choreography – is what makes it all the more incredible.

My preparation and research before starting a MacMillan ballet can range from visiting cities where the work is set, reading books and watching films, to running on a treadmill listening to the musical score. Perhaps MacMillan’s darkest, most emotionally complex, most human and, in my opinion, most masterful work is seen in Mayerling, describing through dance the decay of Crown Prince Rudolf ’s life and the empire surrounding and suffocating him. This three-act ballet, detailing the lives of real people, fascinated my mind beyond reading about the character and the period; somehow I felt a huge sense of responsibility to see the places and palaces of Vienna and the hunting lodge at Mayerling itself.

Reading the Abbé Prévost novel Manon Lescaut was invaluable as it’s told entirely through the eyes of Des Grieux, Manon’s unfortunately devoted lover. This made it easy to personally link events and emotions to the choreography of this leading man.

A ballet like The Rite of Spring, with its exhausting central role of The Chosen One, requires enormous physical stamina and complete musical immersion of Stravinsky’s score. The only way to prepare in my short rehearsal period was to run on the treadmill with the complex rhythms and orchestrations blasting through my iPod. I think why I, and many other dancers, love performing in MacMillan’s ballets is the challenge of seeing how you can make his technically difficult solos and pas de deux say so much more beyond their complex twists, jumps and grips. The test is to actually speak about a character’s state of mind, a couple’s relationship or often to just show through his own musical responses what an entire audience might be feeling.

If I’ve had any success in the MacMillan repertoire, it’s because I’ve learned through performing (and often after making mistakes) to just do what’s there. By that, I mean to fully let the choreography speak for itself,

T H E R O YA L B A L L E T

a SUltRY tale OF DecaDence anD DaRK DeSiRe

Kenneth MacMillan

21 | 28 | aPRil at 7.30PM | 30 aPRil at 7PM 4 | 9 | 10 | 12 | 23 | 26 | 31 MaY at 7.30PM | 7 MaY at 1.30PM anD 7PM 1 JUne at 7.30PM | 4 JUne at 2PM anD 7PM

ORiGinal PRODUctiOn (1974) MaDe POSSiBle BY the linBURY tRUSt

MANON-11_4SHT.indd 1

MAIN STAGE | ROYAL OPERA HOUSE | cOVent GaRDen FOR caSt DetailS anD tO BOOK Online ViSit www.roh.org.uk/manon BOX OFFice +44 (0)20 7304 4000 (MOn-Sat 10aM-8PM) PHOTOGRAPH: Bill cOOPeR DeSiGneD by DeWYnteRS

32

11/3/11 16:12:27

and not to try and say something different or clever, or to reinvent it through interpretation, but to trust what a genius has created and just show that as honestly and fully as I can. I feel different dancing MacMillan work because I enter into a performance knowing I won’t exclusively be showcasing my technique – and it’s the drama and emotions of his works that really fulfil my career. Every time I revisit a role, there is always more to discover and somewhere deeper to go.

Different facets of a particular character or different ways to phrase a sequence or musical response always arise, often unrehearsed and surprising me.

My favourite MacMillan ballet changes all the time.

Often my favourite ballet of his to watch has not always been my favourite to perform, but dancing the roles of Rudolf in Mayerling, Woyzeck in Different Drummer and The Messenger of Death in The Song of the Earth have been hugely rewarding and incredibly emotional experiences. Strangely, playing other people having these experiences – often very far removed from my own life – has made me learn things about myself, my feelings and my own personal responses.

Edward Watson joined The Royal Ballet in December 1994. He was promoted to First Artist at the end of the 1997/98 Season, Soloist in 2001, First Soloist in 2002 and made a Principal in 2005; www.roh.org.uk

Winter 2011

© Royal Opera House - Photo by Bill Cooper, design by DeWynters

© MacMillan Estate - Photograph by Barry Kay

FQR Dance Special

©David Hockney - Photograph by Jonathan Wilkinson

FQR Art

Winter Timber 2009

Charles Saumarez Smith on why next year’s exhibition of large-scale David Hockney landscapes at the RA is bound to make a splash

I

n making all the preparations for the David Hockney exhibition at the Royal Academy, which opens on January 21, I have realised how much I belong to a generation whose visual consciousness has been informed by his work, by his attitude to colour and to drawing, by a particular sensibility as it relates to his views of swimming pools in California. I think, most particularly, of his early work after he left the Royal College of Art, including We Two Boys Together Clinging, which was painted in 1961 with a title from Walt Whitman; A Bigger Splash, painted in the summer of 1967 and now in the collection of the Tate; his picture of Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy, acquired by the Tate in 1971, the year that it was painted; and his portrait of his parents, also in the Tate’s collection, which has a postcard of Piero della Francesca’s Baptism of Christ visible in the mirror between them.

Hockney was the golden boy of the Sixties, producing images that represented the hedonism of that period. I also remember how important it was when, during the Seventies, he and his friend Ron Kitaj emphasised the importance of drawing from the life at a time when it was going (or had gone) nearly completely out of fashion. And I especially remember a moment very soon after I went to work at the V&A in 1982 when he came to lecture about an exhibition that was held at the Hayward Gallery, consisting of work derived from photocopies. Roy Strong described in his introduction to the lecture how he and his wife, Julia Trevelyan Oman, drove through the Herefordshire landscape, imagining it as if it had been depicted by Hockney – Herefordshire transmogrified into California. Hockney himself held a large (and possibly slightly sceptical) audience listening to every word of his discussion of this body of work with a curious and very impressive combination of openness and thoughtfulness, 300 people sitting on hard seats attentive to his every word.

Since then, my closest encounter with Hockney’s work was the opening of Salts Mill in Yorkshire where Jonathan Silver, one of his friends from Bradford (they were both at Bradford Grammar School, although not at the same time), opened a gallery especially devoted to his work. It was the diagnosis of Silver with cancer that led Hockney to spend more time staying with his mother in Bridlington and, in driving from Bridlington to Bradford, he rediscovered a love of the Yorkshire Wolds, where he had worked as a farm labourer when he was a teenager. He began to depict the countryside, fields and hedgerows, particularly the low, rolling hills of the Wolds, in a slightly neo-romantic way, going back to the English landscape tradition of Samuel Palmer and Graham Sutherland, but in hot, Californian colours.

So I was, not surprisingly, extremely sympathetic when it was suggested that the Royal Academy might hold an exhibition in its main galleries based on Hockney’s recent landscape work, but including his older landscape work as well. The suggestion came from Edith Devaney, who has for many years been involved

Winter 2011

Jolly Hockney Sticks

The Road Across the Wolds, 1997

the English landscape tradition of Samuel Palmer and Graham Sutherland, but in hot, Californian colours in making all the arrangements for the Royal Academy’s annual Summer Exhibition. In the Summer Exhibition of 2007, Hockney showed a huge picture, Bigger Trees Near Warter, which had been an experiment, involving the conjunction of multiple canvases, and which he had painted over a period of two months in spring 2007 and donated to the Tate the following year. It was known to Edith that this work derived from his renewed passion for the landscape. She felt, quite rightly, that it would be good – since David Hockney is himself an RA and since the great exhibition galleries, designed by Sydney Smirke, are so wonderfully suited to large paintings – if the Royal Academy were to hold an exhibition of Hockney’s landscape paintings. And Edith, together with Marco Livingstone, a leading expert on Hockney, are acting as joint curators (they both say that, actually, Hockney himself is the third curator, since artists are almost invariably passionately interested in how their recent work is exhibited).

The idea of the exhibition has been serendipitous.

Hockney had already discovered how much he enjoyed just going out into the Yorkshire countryside, parking

his easel by the side of the road, in some ways like a very traditional amateur painter (he has never been afraid of working in an unfashionable way), in order to observe the changing character of the landscape and to record it en plein air. The realisation that this body of work could be made into a big exhibition gave him a renewed impetus, as is evident in the wonderful film that Bruno Wollheim made at this time, which gives a very good indication of Hockney’s working method. He bought a big warehouse on an industrial estate on the outskirts of Bridlington where he could undertake large work.

Hockney likes trees and clearings and hawthorn blossom and the view of roads stretching out into the distance. He’s obsessed by the nature of looking and close observation, describing in the press conference to launch the exhibition how he had asked a friend to describe the colour of the road. The friend said, “I see what you mean.” In Martin Gayford’s recent book, A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney, this story is told slightly differently and the friend is reported as saying after 10 minutes, “I’d never thought what colour the road is.” The point is the same: most

33

people are not normally attentive to close observation of ordinary colour and don’t, like Hockney, spend their life observing minor variations in the colour of ordinary things, the infinite calibration of changing light on the surface of objects and the landscape, including trees, grasses and plants.

There is often a slightly fairytale quality to his pictures, as if he is rediscovering the forces of nature in his old age, together with the occasional cruelty of man cutting down trees, the effect of logging, with images of the sawn trunk of a tree, which he depicts with a quality of magical realism, with the trees reduced to abstract totem poles. I like the fact that he doesn’t mind the exploration of fantasy and is always restlessly experimental in his work.

In the end, I find Hockney’s work impressive for two, oddly contradictory, reasons. The first is that there is a sense in which it cannot help but be deeply informed by his exceptional knowledge of, and interest in the techniques of, Old Master painting. He cites the influence of the work of Dürer, and the exhibition will include his adaptation of Claude’s Sermon on the Mount in the Frick Collection in New York. There is an occasional sense that he is in competition with John Constable and that the Yorkshire Wolds provide a similar sense of sustained satisfaction to that Constable experienced in the fields and meadows round Dedham and East Bergholt. He records in the book of his conversations with Martin Gayford how much he respects the life of Monet at Giverny: “The best form of living I’ve ever seen is Monet’s – a modest house at Giverny, but a very good kitchen, two cooks, gardeners, a marvellous studio. What a life! All he did was look at his lily pond and garden.”

The second reason I find Hockney’s work impressive is exactly the opposite. He’s obsessed by new technology, by photography, by photocopy machines, by film, and now by what can be achieved by working on an iPad, which, in his hands, is an extraordinarily impressive instrument of drawing. So there is always a tension in his work between the traditional task of viewing and observation and then, on the other hand, the ways that attitudes towards landscape and looking have been adapted by changing technologies, as if it is impossible to look at the landscape in a pure way without the intervening mediation of the ways people now view landscape according to the conventions of photography and film.

Hockney doesn’t belong to any school or movement, if he ever did. He is his own person, always exploring the challenge of depiction with a wilfully deceptive attitude of wide-eyed innocence, deliberately winding up critics with his boyish enthusiasms. It is quite likely that the critics will disparage his recent work, as they have tended to ever since his early work in the Sixties.

But I am equally confident that the public will recognise that he belongs to a long tradition of English landscape painters, recording with a fresh eye the wonders of the Yorkshire Wolds.

Charles Saumarez Smith CBE is FQR’s Fine Arts Editor and Secretary and Chief Executive of the Royal Academy of Arts

www.finchsquarterly.com

FQR Art Exclusive

B

Boris Mikhailov

oris Mikhailov is one of the greats of contemporary photography and he is particularly busy right now. Recently in London for Tate’s New Documentary Forms exhibition, then in Hanover preparing his contribution to the Sprengel Museum’s Photography Calling! Photography and the Present and due after in New York for an exhibition at the Pace/MacGill Gallery – who are showing him in a joint exhibition with August Sander works.

Born in Kharkov in the Ukraine, Mikhailov draws on his roots in what was then the Soviet Union – where his art made him the target of the authorities on a number of occasions – and on his personal experience of the collapse of Communism.

His early works include remarkably powerful images of some of society’s most marginalised and disenfranchised people – people and lives he manages to photograph in a peculiarly non-exploitative style – the photographs themselves are often quite shocking, but remain strangely sympathetic.

For Finch’s Quarterly Review, Boris has selected portraits from one of his more recent works. The

The Whitechapel Gallery in East London is branching out in Florida, all thanks to Hilary Weston’s initiative

I

t had always been my and Galen’s dream to create “a village by the sea” – a place where our friends from London, New York and Toronto could get to without changing planes. Eventually, we found exactly the perfect spot, and in 1989 established Windsor in Vero Beach, Florida. It has been our winter home ever since. The undulating dunes of the golf course remind us of the African savannah, and the sea oaks bend their backs against the prevailing wind.

Into this paradise, our daughter, Alannah, who is a passionate art collector, introduced The Gallery at Windsor as a salon-like gathering place and organised many of its exhibitions. Now that she is married with two children and has a full-time job as creative director at Selfridges, I have taken on The Gallery, which is a complete labour of love. Over the years, we’ve built an international reputation for exhibiting some of today’s important artists.

The Whitechapel Gallery is a public space that was

www.finchsquarterly.com

German Portraits series was shot while he was in Braunschweig documenting a German production of Aeschylus’ The Persians – a play about a race coming to terms with defeat. The series consists of some 200 photographs of both professional and non-professional actors auditioning for the production. He has described this series as “my former Soviet methodologies united with German reality”.

I met Mikhailov and his wife Vita in Frankfurt in 1995 when he had won a Coutts Contemporary Art Foundation award and I was to photograph him. In person it quickly became apparent – even through the substantial barrier of my lack of Ukrainian – that he is as charming as he is talented.

Patrick Fetherstonhaugh is FQR’s photography editor Patrick’s photograph of Boris Mikhailov

When East Meets Weston

founded in 1901, and it’s dedicated to presenting modern and contemporary art from around the world.

It premiered many of the great modern masters, from Picasso to Rothko and Gerhard Richter, while also exhibiting emerging artists. Iwona Blazwick, who is director of the Whitechapel Gallery, has been recognised as one of the most important women in the art world today. After we met, we discussed the idea of a collaboration of Whitechapel and The Gallery at Windsor. As non-profits with a similar philosophy and vision, it seemed like a natural fit. So, over the next three years, The Gallery at Windsor is to be home to the Whitechapel Gallery in the US. We are thrilled that Whitechapel will curate solo shows at The Gallery at Windsor to coincide with Art

Basel Miami Beach. One show will feature a rising star; one a modern master and one an iconic figure who is influential today. Our first show features the Brazilian contemporary artist Beatriz Milhazes.

Beatriz’s distinctive, vibrantly coloured works employ both geometric and organic forms to create visually dazzling patterns and compositions. They evoke both the lush tropical environment and rich musical tradition of her native Brazil, and her work also chimes incredibly well with the lush landscape at Windsor and its sunny climate. This was something that Iwona was struck by, when she first visited Windsor.

The exhibition will explore the process Beatriz uses to create her artworks, from the initial sketches to her use of paint and colour, and it is a fascinating and

34

quite different way to exhibit. In particular, the show will feature works from her 15-year collaboration with the Durham Press.

For me, art is a meditative experience. It takes you out of your ordinary everyday life, throws you into another world, and allows you a new kind of experience. I believe that art is an important part of any community, and this belief was really the impetus behind The Gallery at Windsor.

In the past we have been fortunate enough to have exhibited some fine artists, including Peter Doig, Alex Katz and Ed Ruscha. It is a great joy and an honour to continue this tradition by collaborating with the Whitechapel Gallery. What is exciting is that we are on a creative journey with them – a journey that others will be able to participate in, share and enjoy.

Hilary Weston is one of Canada’s most influential women, recognised for her voluntary and philanthropic work. The exhibition of Beatriz Milhazes’ screenprints at The Gallery at Windsor, Florida runs from 3 December 2011 to 29 February 2012; www.windsorflorida.com

Winter 2011