A perceptive item in the Guardian yesterday, from Simon Jenkins: Welcome to the post-digital world, an exhilarating return to civility – via Facebook and Lady Gaga. The point – our contemporary world is a mixed reality – witness the growing importance (again) of “live events”, even as we are more connected digitally: A week in California…
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ornament – overlooked and revisited
I have just received a copy of Diana Newall and Christina Unwin’s marvelous book The Chronology of Pattern [Link] – just published in the UK by Bloomsbury/A & C Black. We still radically separate ornament from style and meaning, treating it as superfluous and superficial, yet it is the primary experience we have of much…
Ruin memories
I have just received a copy of World Crisis in Ruin; the Archaeology of the Former Soviet Missile Sites in Cuba from Mats Burström, Anders Gustafsson and Håkan Karlsson. Another fascinating archaeology of the contemporary past. The 1962 Missile Crisis is a well-known episode in the Cold War and twentieth-century history. It is documented in…
Olivier – Le sombre abîme du temps
Laurent Olivier’s wonderful book Le sombre abîme du temps has just appeared in translation (as The dark abyss of time: memory and archaeology) – [Link] Laurent offers profound elaboration of the fundamental insight that the past is all around us, before us, in material traces, that presence is filled with the past, that the future…
Romaldkirk, Teesdale
Lunch at the Rose and Crown in this extraordinary village – as if of the eighteenth century. Richard (Hingley) – discussing things Roman
looking out and looking up
To the left – oriel window, added by Richard of York, looking out over the upland estate from the Lord’s Hall. To the right – garderobe (latrine), with a finely corbeled chute. Barnard Castle, Teesdale UK, one of the great medieval fortresses of the north
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