The origins of this post date back to July 2008. I went to London and visited Victoria and Albert Museum. I spent most of my time there admiring sculptures by Rodin, Canova and Lord Leighton, and it w...
You know that it took me six years to get to Urbis. Well, it took me seven years to visit Heaton Park, despite the fact that for 4.5 years I lived in Clifton which is only 15 mins by car from Prestwic...
The Arts world was all shook up on Monday 23rd of February 2009 with the news that a portrait of Leonardo da Vinci was discovered by historian Nicola Barbatelli in the village of Acerenza in Basilicat...
Queen Victoria on ‘Fyvie’ with John Brown at Balmoral, originally uploaded by National Galleries of Scotland. “The key goals of The Commons on Flickr are to firstly show you hidden t...
Alfred Schnittke‘s Minnesang is close to my heart for several reasons. It is a sublime piece of music; it was composed in 1980-1981, so it is nearly the same age as me; and it was inspired by Ge...
Birmingham – Christmas Safari, originally uploaded by loscuadernosdejulia. This article is primarily about the 1950 MGM adaptation of Rider Haggard’s novel. For the news about the discover...
When the “is blogging dead?” debate broke out, I thought: I am sure I read about this elsewhere, and it wasn’t on Wired. Ah, here it was: I read about it on Manchizzle blog, on 27 Au...
When I was little, on the 7th November my mother and I once went to see my gran’s sister. Back in 1980s, this day was celebrated as the day of the Great October Socialist Revolution. In the even...
Francesco Petrarca (or Petrarch) is well-known to us as one of the major Italian poets, one of the “three fountains” of Italian Renaissance poetry as Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio are some...
The paintings on the left and right are titled, respectively, My First Sermon (1863) and My Second Sermon (1864). They were painted by one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Sir John E...