Monday 25 July 2011

London

You find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.

(Samuel Johnson)












London, that great cesspool into which all loungers and idlers of the Empire are irresistibly drained. 

(Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

Saturday 16 July 2011

Wet Wednesday

No nude, however abstract should fail to arouse in the spectator some vestige of erotic feeling, even if it be only the faintest shadow-and if it does not do so it is bad art and false morals.

(Kenneth Clark)








Lydia oh Lydia, say have you met Lydia
Lydia, the tattooed lady
She had eyes that adored so
and a torso even more so.

(Harold Arlen & Yip Harburg)


Wednesday 6 July 2011

Paris

Every City has a sex and an age which have nothing to do with demography. Rome is feminine. So is Odessa. London is a teenager, an urchin, and, in this hasn't changed since the time of Dickens. Paris, I believe, is a man in his twenties in love with a much older woman.

(John Berger)












The art galleries in Paris contain the best collection of frames I ever saw.

(Humphry Davy)