Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel destroyed the restrictive, oppressive tenets of Victorian dress with a zeal that was personal. The “exterminating angel of nineteenth century style” released the Modern Woman, an individual designed in her own mould. It was her lifestyle, as …
The ideologues behind the RAAC crisis
At six o’clock in the morning of 16 May 1968, a 56-year-old cake decorator, Mrs Ivy Hodge, went to make a cup of tea in her 18th-floor tower block flat, Ronan Point, in East London. She filled the kettle, rested …
Christopher Wren: godfather of the technocrats
“You have, ladies and gentlemen, to give this much to the Luftwaffe: when it knocked down our buildings, it didn’t replace them with anything more offensive than rubble. We did that.” That was the famous barb which the then-Prince Charles …
The afterlife of Freud’s muse
“One of the main reasons I want to speak to you now is because I’ve become increasingly aware of how both of us are regarded, in relation to men,” writes the artist Celia Paul to the late Welsh portrait painter …
