Daisy Dunn
Train trouble
‘Every holiday of my childhood was spent either looking at art or making it. I remain helpless to resist the pull of the landscape on one side and lure of galleries on the other’
Hot for lunch
If there is an art to writing after three courses and wine, I never mastered it. But now that the long, boozy lunch is endangered, I’m having serious second thoughts
Stick to singles
‘If Pliny the Elder were alive today he’d be fronting Frack Off’
Jam tomorrow
“We do so love a literary rejection, provided it isn’t our own, of course.”
Little Britain
Miniature paintings suit the modern world — we live in a miniaturised world
Programmed poetry
“Every time I read of a new algorithm for producing a hit pop song, or software for writing a Man Booker-worthy novel, I know I’m in for a disappointment”
Minotaurs, Muses and modernity
Classical scholarship for love, not money, leads to some liberating interpretations
Deepdene: Rise and Fall of the House of Hope
The magnificent palazzo where Disraeli’s Young England group used to gather is long gone, but its grounds have now been restored
Maths For Girls
Talking about maths on aesthetic terms might make it more appealing to reluctant teens
Heaney’s Virgil Is Our Virgil
The posthumous publication of Aeneid VI is a katabasis for Heaney’s father
China has a strategy and Britain doesn’t
A roadmap to better relations requires realism. Beijing’s interests and goals are openly stated—if you know where to look
The plague
Standpoint goes to press as the pandemic rages. So too does the search for blame and the political fall-out
Defeat begets defeat for Britain’s cloth-eared Left
The censorious culture of the liberal Left is hostile to freedom of expression. The fate of the trans-rights movement evinces this pointless politics