Dear H,
You might have caught the news, last spring, that the prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, ordered another swathe of early releases from prisons in England, citing overcrowding in the cells. They quickly filled up again, leaving us with the impression that hundreds of old lags had been evicted in order to accommodate a round of convicts new to the profession. Baffling enough at the time. Since then, we have learned that an unofficial early release scheme is in operation at the nation’s jails all year round. In the twelve months to March 2025, for example, 262 prisoners were let out in error before completing their sentences. The blunders came to public notice last October, after an asylum seeker awaiting deportation for sex offenses was guided by prison officers from Chelmsford Prison in Essex to the nearest railway station. Before they realized the mistake, he was on a train to London and soon reported as “on the run”—more likely sheltering under a bush somewhere in a state of bewilderment. Nothing unites the nation like a manhunt. Spotted in a park by a Sunday morning dog walker, the man was apprehended and ushered onto a flight to his native Ethiopia, not before demanding £500 to go quietly. The alternative was a costly legal process for the government.
It was just one chapter in a season of Westminster embarrassments. In early September, Angela Rayner, the deputy prime minister, was pushed out—few euphemisms do greater service than “resigned”—over a mini-scandal involving the purchase of a house without payment of the regulation property tax. It didn’t help Ms. Rayner’s case that she had made a mistake that she was also the secretary of state for housing. On September 4, Sir Keir expressed “full confidence” in his deputy. The next day she was gone. The process was repeated a week later when the country’s ambassador to the United States, Peter Mandelson, was revealed to have had connections to Jeffrey Epstein. Photographs emerged, one showing Mandelson in a fluffy white dressing gown on the deck of an Epstein residence, chuckling at his host’s remarks. When Sir Keir expressed his full confidence, Mandelson must have known it was time to pack his bags. Back from Washington he came. There were questions to answer, the principal one being: Why did the prime minister appoint a man with a known history of dubious dealings to such a post in the first place? The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rachel Reeves, a favorite of Sir Keir, has also had questions to answer about property taxes, among other things. At the time of writing, there is talk of a possible coup at No. 10 Downing Street. The great mantra of modern politics is “Change!” We had it when a Labour government gained power in July 2024, after fourteen years of Conservative rule. You won’t rouse the masses with the call “Stability!,” but it would be reassuring.
Not many things lift my spirits like a Picasso exhibition. The abundance of feeling and invention expressed in every touch never fails to astonish. Tate Modern, on London’s South Bank, is hosting a show until April 2026 called “Theatre Picasso,” which, the Tate suggests, will make us “Experience Picasso’s works in a new way.” Change, again. I’d happily experience them in the way I always have done, only more so. One surprise is that the display of some forty-five works is drawn entirely from the Tate’s own holdings, yet just a few hang in the free-to-enter galleries throughout the year.
The phrase “in a new way” evokes the specter that haunts the contemporary exhibition: over-curation. The organizers explain their title by citing Picasso’s “fascination with theatre, dance and popular forms such as circus and flamenco.” If we are able to understand how he “used these tools from performance,” it will help us to see “how he related to the world around him, placing his work in dialogue with the fundamental questions of our time.”
That’s getting fuzzy. The phrase “fundamental questions of our time” sounds grand, until you ask what it points to. The rise of anti-Semitism? The fragility of democracy? The decline of literacy? The politicization of just about everything? While you are compiling your own list, the curators move on: “If we look at Tate’s Picasso collection in its entirety, what does it reveal?” There is no simple answer, but if it gets his work out of the basement and onto the walls, I’ll go along with it. Some magnificent pictures are on display. A Cubist Seated Nude, from 1909–10, was familiar to me; Woman in an Armchair No. 1, a beautiful semi-realist lithograph from 1949 (sometimes called The Polish Cloak), was not. I have my own question: Why not establish a permanent Picasso room for these forty-five works?
Heading towards the exit, I was thinking I had got off lightly in respect of the by-now familiar didacticism that is apt to spoil the exhibition-goer’s pleasure. But just there by the door, a card offered the information that Picasso took an interest in art “from across Africa and the Pacific Islands,” that he “freely appropriated from the artworks of colonised peoples, which some have interpreted as a form of theft.” The philistines are always among us—you knew that—but you don’t expect them to be in charge of exhibitions at Tate Modern.
At the same time, the National Gallery presents “Radical Harmony: Helene Kröller-Müller’s Neo-Impressionists” (until February 8). Kröller-Müller (1869–1939) was a German collector, who established a museum in Holland to house her collection of paintings by Vincent van Gogh, Georges Seurat, Paul Signac, and others. The word “Impressionist” in the title of any exhibition attracts the public. The artists dominating this show are less often referred to as Neo-Impressionists than as pointillists: masters of a technique which relies on individually applied dabs of paint to create a luminous surface. There are pleasing works on display, including Seurat’s large-scale representation of can-can dancers, with orchestra members in the foreground, but an air of lifelessness hangs about many of the dotted canvases, which, it seemed to me, influenced viewers on my visit. Pointillism is notably useful for sea and sky, and rather too many scenes are evocative of grey weekday winter afternoons in sparsely populated harbor towns in Northern France—Port-en-Bessin in Normandy (Signac), Gravelines, near Dunkirk (Seurat). One Neo-Impressionist called the pointillist product “a result of tones and lines for which reality serves only as a pretext,” which unwittingly sums up the problem.
My favorite painter after Picasso is his quasi-homonym, Pissarro, and the loveliest work in the rooms is Late Afternoon in Our Meadow (1887), in which a headscarfed figure pauses among trees and their shadows in hazy sunlight. Pissarro is more often grouped with Monet and Sisley, among other Impressionists. An added element of their appeal to me is that all three lived in London for significant periods following the turbulent events in Paris of 1870–72. They left us views of the Thames, its bridges and boats, of suburban street scenes, of snow and fog. Pissarro painted cricket matches on Kew Green. Late Afternoon in Our Meadow, which belongs to his brief pointillist period, comes not from Kröller-Müller but the National Gallery’s own collection. More than one critic of the show was unable to resist the quip that the laborious technique was “dotty.” I wouldn’t go that far, but I was grateful to Pissarro for lending some warmth as I emerged into Trafalgar Square.
Members of the National Gallery, of whom I am one, are entitled to enter at any time, but my eyes popped at the price of a ticket to “Radical Harmony”: £25 per person. These shows are hugely expensive to arrange, and the costs of insurance and transportation rise all the time. The National offers an admirable concession: each Friday evening, for a limited stretch of time, “we invite visitors to pay what they wish for this exhibition.”
Not all pursuits of artistic pleasure need be pricey. With £25 in your pocket, you could tour some of London’s secondhand bookshops and return home with a basketful of treasures. The capital still has a stout array of such places, ranging from miscellaneous to antiquarian, with charity bookshops in between. When I was writing a weekly column on literary matters in the Times Literary Supplement, one of its most popular features (if I may put it that way) was the regular “perambulation” around secondhand bookshops—not only in London but in Brighton, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Paris and beyond. The objective was to find “a lesser known work by an established writer,” for £5 or under. Flexibility was adopted as the years went by. Among the unexpected items to come my way was a copy of James Baldwin’s collection of short stories, Going to Meet the Man, inscribed for “Vyvienne, My favorite Miss Pross.” The bookseller had failed to recognize the signature, and I confess I failed to alert him. It cost £3. I can identify Miss Pross, from A Tale of Two Cities, but not Vyvienne. Any suggestions?
One weekend in November, my companion and I made a tour of three favorites, in order to test the rumor that what Americans call used bookstores are in decline. Our first stop was Archive Books and Music, near Baker Street. I hadn’t been in for some time. The appeal is apparent straight away: it is crammed with books, on the shelves, on the floor, in boxes, occupying a space half the size of an average living room. There are capacious cut-price barrows outside, always the sign of a good shop. The basement is given over to music books and scores, as well as a piano on which some of the ivories have been replaced with wooden keys. See the owner, Tim Meaker, slip downstairs and a Chopin nocturne might rise to the surface.
The Archive hasn’t changed—except that there are yet more books. Here I found our curiosity: Elizabethan Essays by T. S. Eliot, published by Faber and Faber in 1934, a neat octavo hardback in green cloth. The eleven articles—on Marlowe, Middleton, Massinger, Shakespeare and others—made their way into later collections, but this particular title is not often seen. The first essay is intriguing by itself: “Four Elizabethan Dramatists: A Preface to an Unwritten Book.” A first edition, second impression, it had £4.50 pencilled lightly on the flyleaf.
Next stop was Skoob Books in Bloomsbury, just off Marchmont Street, a lively strip housing cafés, pubs and several bookshops. Skoob specializes in buying and selling textbooks to students from the nearby universities but keeps a good general literary stock. It, too, had barely changed since my last visit. A healthy assortment of customers browsed on a Saturday afternoon. The same was true of another favorite, Walden Books, situated in a genteel street not far from the weekend pandemonium of Camden Market.
A proper bibliophile I knew once said that even if nothing in particular catches the eye, you ought to buy something anyway. His signal for it being time to leave was, “One for the colonel, then?,” whereupon a few coins would be handed over in exchange for a Penguin Classic. The purchase I settled on at Walden was not intended for the colonel. It was a collection of poems by Pablo Neruda, Fully Empowered, with facing-page translations by the Scottish writer Alastair Reid. Neruda told Reid, one of his regular translators, “Alastair, don’t just translate my poems. I want you to improve them.” The American chap who was minding the shop knocked a couple of pounds off the pencilled price, a kindly gesture frequently encountered. My companion presented two lesser-known Balzac novels from the barrows outside, each priced at £4. The requested sum was a fiver for the pair. Protest was futile. It has little to do with money, and everything to do with the charm of the London secondhand bookshop which, all things considered, is in reasonable shape. If setting up a consultancy on the business, my first rule would be: Don’t submit to order and tidiness; congenial chaos is the mood.
The TLS itself has undergone some recent changes. A weekly since its founding in 1902, it switched to fortnightly publication at the beginning of September. The number of pages has increased, and the quality of paper improved, but the format size has shrunk, and it no longer has the feel of a newspaper. A colorful re-design had been imposed by Stig Abell, the editor between 2016–20, but his successor, Martin Ivens, has reverted to something more like the austere model of old. Most TLS readers I speak to approve. Still, literary magazines exist on a slippery slope at the best of times, and climbing upwards is difficult. Halving the number of copies readers receive per year, with no reduction in the subscription price, carries risks.
Many of England’s arts institutions receive sums from Arts Council England (ACE), from the humble poetry magazine to the National Theatre and the Royal Opera. ACE is in turn funded by the taxpayer (Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland have separate arrangements). The grants are subject to regular review, and in recent times the review has come with added conditions and maddening new boxes to be ticked. Many of these relate to that spirit of the age, “diversity,” not only of the race, class and gender sort, but diversity of location, too. English National Opera, for example, situated at the Coliseum just a stone’s throw from the National Gallery, was told three years ago by the then Conservative culture secretary that the company had to remove to Manchester if it wished to continue to receive funding. It is planning to open in the Northern city by 2029, without leaving London altogether. The ENO could not survive without the money it receives from ACE (recently reduced from something like £12 million to £8 million annually). Many modest opera and theatre companies up and down the land are in a similar position.
London has concert halls of different shapes and sizes. Surely the most intimate and attractive is the Wigmore Hall, just north of Oxford Circus. Built in 1901, it retains its original outline and atmosphere and deserves its characterization as the “home of the string quartet, the solo piano, and the song recital”—and much else besides, most of it popular with the Wigmore’s loyal patrons. All of it is expensive to run. In March 2025, however, the artistic director, John Gilhooly, announced that he was withdrawing from the Arts Council’s National Portfolio funding scheme and mounted a campaign raising £10 million (the Wigmore’s most recent grant was a relatively skimpy £344,206). The chairman of ACE addressed a disobliging letter to Gilhooly, accusing him of being anti-diversity, with its predictable discontents. In an interview published in the Spectator in the autumn, Gilhooly dismissed the charge but declined the opportunity to respond in kind. Instead, he indicated a future program of events that includes not only the “pillars which keep this place up: Beethoven, Schubert and so on,” but twentieth-century Modernists, a weekend of African music, jazz piano, and Bach played on period instruments.
When I sit in one of the Wigmore Hall’s 545 seats, I’m surrounded by young and old, well-dressed and scruffy, resolutely fogeyish and formidably fashionable, all apparently happy. In June, we heard the Belcea Quartet play Schoenberg’s String Quartet No. 1, which was sublime on first exposure and promised to be more so on subsequent hearings. The Beethoven late quartet that followed (Opus 131) sounded old-fashioned by comparison. In late November, the cellist Steven Isserlis and pianist Connie Shih performed several pieces, including works by Dvořák and Martinů. Did others in the packed-out hall besides me wait in hope of Isserlis’ once-customary Beatles encore?
The Beatles never recorded at Regent Sounds Studios on Denmark Street, sometimes called London’s Tin Pan Alley, in the 1960s. The Rolling Stones did, however. Their version of Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away,” with Mick Jagger chugging twin maracas in each hand, emerged from Regent Sounds Studios in February 1964. It was the song that brought the Stones to prominence as scowling rivals to those lads from Liverpool your mum and dad liked. The Stones also recorded their first LP here, made up mostly of American rhythm-and-blues covers. The old studio space, relatively small at about 30 feet by 20, currently functions as a guitar shop, but it is hoped that old-style recording will resume during 2026. On a recent visit, a helpful assistant called Tim steered me in the direction of a contemporary report of the Stones’ presence, pinned to the wall. I learned that studio time cost a sizable £5 per hour in the mid-1960s, when a decent weekly wage would be £25. This explains why many now-classic albums were recorded in a day and a half. The fee included use of a piano and the advice of a sound engineer. Band members, I read, were expected to provide their own guitars.
A blown-up photograph of Jimi Hendrix in action takes pride of place on the shop floor, though it is thought he used Regent Studios only for demos. The walls are surrounded by guitars, electric and acoustic, some new, others used. A few called vintage demand extravagant prices. Who buys these chipped Hank Marvin Fenders at £17,000? I asked Tim. Collectors, he said, adding that they are probably never played after being sold. He advises anyone thinking of buying a “special edition” instrument signed by a favorite guitar wizard “to be very careful and make sure the paperwork is watertight.”
Life in Denmark Street has been overshadowed for some years by the extensive “development” taking place—read “demolition,” if you prefer—around this corner of Oxford Street and Charing Cross Road. A decent number of music shops survive for now. I thanked Tim, stepped outside, and gave praise to Cecilia of Rome, the patron saint of music, and to Mick and Keith of Dartford, Kent. No saints, certainly, but worthy of gratitude, nonetheless.
JAMES CAMPBELL