Latest news with #Victoriana
Forbes
6 days ago
- Business
- Forbes
Father's Day Gift Guide 2025: The Best Luxury Hotel Gifts
These salmon flies are hand-tied in Scotland and sold by the Fife Arms. Luxury hotels are used to catering for - and enchanting - a clientele who are used to having the best of everything. Their superb curation of experiences also extends to their boutiques. Here are some of the best gifts to treat the father in your life. This Edinburgh hotel has opened a shop that shares its Victorian aesthetic. Edinburgh's most experiential hotel - The Witchery- has linked up with the city's most famous leather goods specialist MacKenzie. Inspired by the hotel's exuberant Victoriana, the Gladstone Overnight Travel Bag (£1595) combines leather and brass fittings with the finest Scottish, fully waterproofed canvas. Designed for weekend breaks, the large main compartment has a pocket suitable for a small laptop or a wash bag. The base is reinforced, and solid brass feet keep it off the ground, ensuring your bag is fit to take you on a lifetime of adventures. Bamford London has produced a new watch for the Hotel du-Cap-Eden-Roc on France's Cote d'Azur. Just in time for Father's Day, Hotel du-Cap-Eden-Roc has launched the Bamford Riviera Watch – a limited-edition collaboration between the iconic hotel in Antibes and the luxury watch company Bamford London. This sleek timepiece comes in three Mediterranean-inspired hues: Sea Blue, Sky Blue, or White. With its stainless-steel casing, self-winding movement, waterproof design, and the iconic Eden-Roc lifebuoy detailing the second hand. The Claridge's Cocktail Gift Set will help your father get a taste for Fumoir, Claridge's famous bar. Revisit - or anticipate - a trip to Fumoir, Claridge's justly venerated cocktail bar with this Claridge's Cocktail Gift Set (£175.00). A deeply delicious dive into the hotel's Jazz Age (see also the hotel's Bright Young Things Sleepover package). The set comes with two ready-mixed bottles of Fumoir's Old Fashioned and Negroni. The gift also contains a copy of Claridge's The Cocktail Book, plus olives and mixed nuts, wrapped up in a gift box with ribbons and a fully authentic sense of indulgence. Taurus is the new blended whisky from the Torridon hotel in Scotland. One of Scotland's best-kept hotel secrets, the family-run Torridon hotel in Wester Ross has just launched the limited edition Taurus Whisky (£125). Blending a two-grain whisky with a single malt, with hints of aged apple, stone fruits and vanilla, Taurus Whisky is a labour of love born from The Torridon's owner, Dan Bristow and his best friend Hamish, who hails from a distinguished distilling family. Gleneagles Hotel in Scotland Since it opened a century ago, Scotland's most famous hotel has been known as the Glorious Playground. With the opening of the Gleneagles Sporting Club, there's even more reason to love Gleneagles. Produced in Scotland with 100% Lambswool Shetland Cloth and inspired by the surrounding Ochil Hills, the Tweed Flat Cap (£130) comes in three sizes and is tailor-made for strolls across the countryside. The Newt has a new collaboration with the cult Niwaki producer of garden implements. In a particularly apt cross-pollination, Somerset's acclaimed Newt hotel and gardens in Somerset has joined forces with the cult Niwaki garden tool company. A blend of horticultural expertise with Japanese craftsmanship, the range includes the Niwake Samue jacket in Newt green and the Hori Hori tool (£38), a gardening tool for digging, weeding, and planting bulbs, engraved with The Newt's logo and accompanied by a custom canvas sheath. The Fife Arms in Braemar has showcased Scottish crafts since opening in 2018. Yes, Scotland is strongly featured on this list, but its craft traditions are currently in a very sweet spot that utilises both heritage skills and innovation. The Fife Arms has been instrumental in championing these. Based on the River Dee, TwinPeakes is dedicated to the art of fly fishing and has created a collection of bespoke salmon flies most suited to Highland fishing spots. The Fife Arms Salmon Fishing Tin (£145) has nine flies that are each individually hand-tied in Scotland using a palette of the Fife Arms colours. For different conditions in the season, the flies are presented in an engraved aluminium fly tin made by renowned fly tin maker Richard Wheatley Ltd and lined with sustainable British wool. These cricket socks epitomise Estelle Manor's playful approach to its boutique's offering There's nothing wrong with socks as a Father's Day gift, especially if they come from Estelle Manor, the ultra-hip Oxfordshire members' club and hotel. These nicely retro Estelle Manor cricket socks (£20) will multitask for other sports too and have plum detailing. The Hoxton has collaborated with Barc London to produce matching sweaters for dogs and their humans. For all the dog dads out there, the Hoxton Hotel group has collaborated with Barc London to produce a collection of matching knits. With two patterns - Out of Office and Holiday Club - using the colour palette of the global Hoxton group, each jumper helps support local dog shelters with a 10 per cent donation from the profits. Made from 100 per cent cotton, human ($60) and canine versions ($40) come in XS to XL versions.
Time Out
13-05-2025
- General
- Time Out
WC - Wine & Charcuterie
The picket fence goes up by 6pm, partioning off a little patch of ground next to Clapham Common's tube station. The folding tables then fill up in minutes with glass-clinking sybarites, attracting the stares of zipped-up commuters. This former public toilet, integral to the Tube station but derelict for years, is now a wine bar, which turns its tiny outside space into a drinking terrace. Down the wide stairs it still looks and feels like a Victorian convenience, albeit a sanitised one. The wall tiles and floor mosaics are still there, the cubicle doors have been laid flat and turned into tables within secluded and low-lit booths. Other fixtures and fittings are also reclaimed Victoriana, much of it from a nearby school. It's cosy and appealing. A score of wines are sold, from a dry German Riesling to a Bulgarian Merlot. Service is enthusiastic and engaging, and the cheese platters and charcuterie plates are both are better than bog standard.
The Guardian
03-05-2025
- General
- The Guardian
31 of England's prisons are Victorian. Do they work?
England in the 1840s was a place of dizzying industry, rapid urbanisation and technological progress. Among the proliferation of inventions, a new type of building was unveiled to the world. A prison, K-shaped with long corridors made of sure, thick walls, and small windows in cold, solitary cells. The design of Pentonville was heralded by the fashionable print media of the day. The new prison will be most conducive to the reformation of prisoners and to the repression of crime … It resolves itself into a greater uniformity of plan and purpose than has yet been exhibited in prison Illustrated London News in its coverage of the new facility on August 13, 1842. It became a blueprint on which 90 others were built in the next 35 years: the beginning of England's Victorian prison estate. But while most of the industrial mainstays of 19th-century design have since faded into sepia-tinted vestiges of Victoriana, prisons like Pentonville are far from redundant – in fact they have never been busier. Today, Britain is the most incarcerated country in western Europe. Incredibly, 31 of the jails still in operation in England and Wales were built by the Victorians. They house about 22,000 prisoners, a quarter of the prison population. Inside, their damp, crowded, poorly ventilated cells have become a symbol of the prison system in this country. And the system is in crisis. Violent disorder, phones, drugs and drone smuggling are all urgent issues on HMP's agenda. In this investigation we explore how centuries-old design is failing those who suffer at the hands of this very modern crisis. The piers or partitions between them are 18 inches thick, and are worked with close joints, so as to preclude as much as possible the transmission of sound. A description of HMP Pentonville in the Illustrated London News, 1843 Victorian prisons were designed to reform inmates through silent, solitary contemplation in cells which were arranged to keep them isolated. Cells were built to house one prisoner, alone. But as the prison population in England and Wales has ballooned over the centuries, the days when all prisoners were allocated their own individual cell have faded into memory. While the Victorians built or extended 90 prisons to accommodate about 20,000 people, currently there are 122 prisons in total for a population of more than 80,000. In these conditions prisoners share confined spaces. In 17 out of 31 Victorian prisons in use, more than half of inmates are held in crowded accommodation – defined as two people sharing a cell that is meant to be for one person only. In some jails, like Durham, Usk, Wandsworth and Swansea, it is more than 75% of the prison population. How much space should a prisoner have? The answer is not easy to find. The Prison Service instructions and frameworks provide no minimum measurements for cells, but the EU's Committee for the Prevention of Torture (CPT) recommends that a multi-occupancy cell should provide at least 4 sq metres of living space per prisoner, not including a sanitary facility. The HM Prisons Inspectorate calculates that, as a sanitary facility is about 1-2 sq metres, the cell should offer 4.5 sq metres per person. In 2017, they found that the majority of cells they inspected that year did not meet this standard. Small shared cells are more frequently found in Victorian prisons. In a shared cell measured at HMP Brixton each prisoner had 3.36 sq metres of space – about the size of a small elevator. Cramming prisoners in cells means being creative with the use of space. Guidance for arranging furniture in single cells that need to house more than one prisoner shows how a typical Victorian-built single cell might be arranged when shared by two people. This diagram from the 2012 Prison Service instruction shows stacked beds placed across from small wardrobes with a screen dividing the sleeping area and the toilet. The Ministry of Justice said this diagram was no longer applicable as the 2012 PSI was superseded by a 2022 accommodation framework. This new framework does not provide minimum measurement requirements for cells, however. HM Inspectorate of Prisons found in surveys conducted in 2017 that while some prisoners had positive experiences of cell-sharing, for others it caused stress. One of the inmates quoted in the the report said: 'Being forced to share a single cell with strangers, whilst also having to use broken, uncurtained toilets; eat one's meals in this environment; and sometimes being locked up for over 20 hours a day is not respectful or humane.' Architect Roland Karthaus, author of a study on prison design that won a Riba award in 2018, said lack of personal space in overcrowded single cells was particularly damaging because it was persistent. He said: 'If you're standing in a tube carriage and your personal space shrinks to accommodate, that is stressful. But you can cope quite happily with being stressed for a short period of time on the tube. If you are in an environment – with severely limited personal space – for the majority of the day, every single day, you have no relief from it, and the cumulative effect is really damaging.' At least two Dutch studies have found that prisoners housed in double rooms experienced more distant and less frequent staff-prisoner interactions, as well as less perceived privacy, more health problems and more prisoner misconduct. A US study found that single-cell inmates exhibited lower levels of the hormones related to the 'flight or flight' response than those who shared a dormitory. Karthaus suggests that these kinds of conditions can inhibit the prospect of rehabilitation. He said: 'The prevalence of physical ill health, drug and substance abuse in people coming into prison is higher than average in the population. So you're taking unwell people, and you're putting them in an environment that makes them more unwell – and then your aim is that they will enter society in an improved way. 'The environment that essentially contributes to people's poor health is working against that.' Victorian prisons were originally built in the outskirts of towns and cities. But as cities grew, they absorbed them. So currently, 70% of the Victorian prisons currently in operation are within the boundaries of major towns and cities. This means the average immediate surroundings of Victorian prisons are 3.5 times more populated than non-Victorian prisons. As these prisons have become enclosed in cities, they are difficult to expand, which restricts the opportunity to provide better green spaces and outdoor facilities. Their proximity to urban centres also facilitates the importation of drugs, knives and potentially firearms into prisons via drones, through the bars. Nevertheless, the picture is nuanced as newer facilities built further away from community and families have their own limitations when it comes to rehabilitation. A prison review conducted by Lord Farmer looked into the importance of prisoners' family ties to prevent reoffending and reduce intergenerational crime in 2017. It recommended that prisoners should be held in community prisons as near to their homes as possible, citing a Ministry of Justice report that found that the odds of reoffending were 39% higher for prisoners who had not received visits compared with those who had. It said: 'The closure of some of the old Victorian jails creates significant scope for change in this area, but has the major downside of removing prisoners further from their communities and making it harder for families to visit.' Frances Crook, former CEO of the Howard League for Penal Reform, said proximity to community was vital for rehabilitation. She said: '[Victorian prisons] are close to people's families, to local services including housing and health, and can be supported by voluntary organisations. They also feel local to the men detained in them. 'They are all going to be released sooner or later and as we all know, the best hope of leading a good and useful life on release is someone to love you, somewhere to live and something to do. All this is more achievable if people reside in prisons local to their city homes.' Most Victorian prisons are category B or local, so they are the first option for people sentenced or on remand who have been taken directly from court in their local area. This means many people spend their first night in incarceration in a Victorian prison. Some academics make the case for turning local prisons into open ones, known as category D jails. Prof Dominique Moran, who has extensively studied Victorian prisons and has presented her findings to a parliamentary committee, said: 'Our open prisons tend to be in out-of-town locations – rural locations – where there's not a ready supply of things that incarcerated people working towards reintegration can do. 'Arguably, there would be all sorts of advantages in having open prisons closer to urban areas. And if you have people in open prisons, by definition, they're not in their cell all day long. So they would only be coming to these cells to sleep, and that would be minimising the amount of time that they spend in them.' Moran also said the nearness to urban centres made staff easier to recruit and retain than in isolated places. It will be observed that the Wings or Divisions containing the Cells being connected with the centre, the whole interior of the prison and the door of every cell are seen from one central point. The stairs … do not impede a clear view being obtained … and every movement within the prison, whether of an officer or a prisoner, is therefore under constant observation and control. From the Report of the Surveyor-General of Prisons on the construction, ventilation, and details of Pentonville Prison, 1844 The typical K-shaped Victorian prison had wings of small, single cells arranged along landings three or more storeys high, around a central hub from where one single prison officer had clear sight of all the prisoners. You can explore this type of space from the inside with the following 360 view of HMP Reading, which closed in 2014. The K-block may be a feature of Victorian design, but its appeal among both prisoners and staff seems to remain. One study linked the long galleries and good sight lines to feelings of safety. Moran said: 'Not everybody has exactly the same opinion, but a lot of staff talk about the safety that comes from good visibility, and that they get very attuned to the acoustics of that building – they can hear one another talking or shouting or whatever is going off, which means that staff feel confident operating that space. 'That translates into incarcerated people also feeling that the staff can see what's going on and feeling more confident in that environment.' Her study also found that 'in Victorian-era prisons, staff were more likely to be out on the landings interacting with incarcerated people, with the result that they knew them better and were better able to support rehabilitation'. However, the philosophy of the Victorian model once again rubs up against the realities of the modern day estate when it comes to maintenance and accessibility. Narrow landings, steep staircases, and the difficulty of installing lifts are problematic for an ageing prisoner population, meaning they have fewer opportunities to leave their wing. The number of people in prison aged 50 or over has nearly trebled, rising from about 5,000 in 2003 to about 15,000 in 2024. Despite its Victorian focus on surveillance, the K-block design has endured. The distinctive blueprint is still used for modern prisons such as HMP Berwyn in Wales, the second largest prison in the UK, which was built in 2017. 'Even in our very newest facilities, we have built Victorian hub-spoke, galleried prisons, just like those built for the separate system, but now in concrete, and with integrated plumbing and wiring', says a study on prison design by Karthaus. So admirably is the ventilation of the building contrived and kept up, that there is not the least sense of closeness pervading it, for we feel, immediately we set foot in the place, how fresh and pure is the atmosphere in a description of Pentonville Prison in The Great World of London by Henry Mayhew, 1865 Victorian prisons have been altered in many ways throughout the years: sanitation facilities and electricity have been installed, wings have been extended, wire netting has been extended over galleries to prevent suicide, and more recently, anti-drone nets have been installed to stop drug retrofitting modern heating and ventilation standards into 19th-century buildings is difficult, and as a result, prisoners can be subject to uncomfortable temperatures and sound stress, which, like other stressors within the environment, affect wellbeing and can have implications for rehabilitation. For the Victorians, suppressing all communication between prisoners was vital. Soundproofing was considered essential and walls were made to be 18 inches or 'two bricks and half' thick. These thick walls take time to warm up in the winter, and in the summer, they retain and radiate heat. A 2017 report on living conditions from HMIP found that in some Victorian prisons 'windows could not be opened properly and cells were poorly ventilated. In summertime, some prisoners reported that they break windows that cannot be opened in order to provide ventilation'. The Victorians had built a ventilation system featuring stoves in the basement that supplied warm air through iron vents in the cell floors, and the foul air was carried off through vents above the cell doors. But according to a Howard League for Penal Reform report into Victorian prisons, alterations and fire safety regulations have meant that many cell vents have been blocked. While the impact of poor temperature regulation has not been studied in prisons, studies of office environments identify thermal comfort as 'one of the leading factors impacting general satisfaction with indoor environments.' Apart from the physiological responses, 'extreme temperatures have been found to impact our affinity for those around us, and have even been linked to behavioural outcomes such as aggression'. Karthaus's study on prison design states that 'there is some evidence to suggest that people are more likely to help others under more optimal temperature conditions (relative to season). The relationship between temperature, emotional state, and pro- or antisocial behaviour is a complex one, but there is strong overarching evidence for the wellbeing benefits of thermal comfort.' Karthaus has also pointed to the use of hard materials with poor acoustic absorption as another factor which can cause prisoner discomfort. The lack of sound absorption in an environment where shouts and bangs persistently ring out means even indistinct noises echo over time, creating a maddening echo chamber of muffled sound. It can even encourage prisoners to be louder. Karthaus said: 'When you have very high reverberation time in a space, it means that nobody can hear what anyone is saying, so everyone is shouting all of the time. If you're in an environment that is continuously noisy all of the time, and you cannot escape from the noise, that is deeply damaging.' Charlie Taylor, the chief inspector of prisons, said that in particular, 19th-century jails could be 'incredibly noisy and distressing' for many prisoners who demonstrate symptoms of autism. He said: 'Lots of prisoners have got autistic spectrum disorder and therefore you know that that incredible racket that you get in those prisons is really unconducive to any sort of rehabilitative work.' Ministers despair at the state of the prison estate across England and Wales, and the crumbling Victorian jails that still house more than a quarter of inmates. After July's general election, evidence of neglect and dilapidation was everywhere and has been backed by reports from Taylor, the prisons watchdog. He uncovered examples of rat and pigeon infestations, damp and mould. Walls at HMP Winchester were so wet that prisoners could remove their own cell doors or dig through with plastic cutlery. But in the short to medium term, Victorian prisons must be kept open, officials have said. Why? Because current projections show that the prison population is predicted to reach 100,000 by 2029. There is no way that the speed of Ministry of Justice's building programme will mean that any of the 19th-century prisons could be closed by 2029. Instead, the government has committed to refurbishing the Victorian estate, which officials claim will 'bring around 1,000 cells into the 21st century'. By the end of this year, it also expects to bring back online about 350 places in Victorian prisons that are out of use. New prisons are being built while new blocks are being added to existing prisons. The government has set itself a target of building 14,000 more prison places by 2031. In March, the category C jail HMP Millsike was opened in East Yorkshire for 1,500 inmates. Unlike Victorian prisons, it includes workshops and training facilities aimed at getting offenders into work on release and reinforced barless windows to deter drone activity, hundreds of CCTV cameras and X-ray body scanners. Another 700 places are being built at HMP Highpoint near Haverhill, Suffolk, which will make it the largest prison in the UK. At the same time, a review of sentencing by former Tory justice secretary David Gauke is expected to recommend in late spring including scrapping shorter sentences and treating more offenders in the community alternatives to jail. And so Victorian prisons will remain in use for many years along with their associated problems.
The Guardian
07-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Cora Kaplan obituary
My friend Cora Kaplan, who has died aged 84, was a feminist trailblazer in the field of literary and cultural studies. Her 1975 critical anthology of women's poetry, Salt and Bitter and Good: Three Centuries of English and American Women Poets, was one of the first of its kind, and her collected essays, Sea Changes: Culture and Feminism (1986), played a key role in ushering feminist readings of fiction, poetry, and popular culture into the mainstream of literary studies. In her 2007 book Victoriana, she reappropriated the term to demonstrate how 19th-century values and voices were seeping into the cultural and political atmosphere. Her prolific work as an editor included Imagining British Slavery with John Oldfield (2009), and the 10-volume series The History of British Women's Writing, with Jennie Batchelor (2010-18). Born in New York, Cora was the daughter of Emma (nee Nogrady), a college librarian, and Sidney Kaplan, professor of English at the University of Massachusetts. Together, her parents were pioneers in African American studies, writing books on black culture and history in the US. After attending Northampton high school, Cora studied English at Smith College, graduating in 1961. She subsequently began a PhD at Brandeis University, but left before completion to take up a lectureship post in the school of English and American studies at Sussex University (1969-88). She subsequently held a chair in English at Rutgers University in New Jersey (1989-95), and returned to the UK as professor, and from 2005 professor emerita, at Southampton University. She was also a visiting professor at Queen Mary University of London (2005-09) and a senior research fellow at King's College London (2011-13). She then taught at the Bread Loaf US summer school at Lincoln College, Oxford (2015-19), before retiring from teaching with the onset of the 2020 pandemic. Cora had a gift for showing how the most intimate aspects of family and personal life percolate, often unconsciously, into our political life. For example in her 1983 essay Wild Nights – Pleasure, Sexuality, Feminism, she argued that the complex, unruly subjectivity of Mary Wollstonecraft lay at the core of the 18th-century philosopher's politics. Following in her parents' footsteps, she also made interventions in the field of race and culture, such as in her inaugural lecture at Southampton, Black Heroes/White Writers: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the Literary Imagination. I met her at Sussex when I began teaching there in 1976, and am one of many who, in moments of crisis, from student occupations to the backlash against feminism, relied on her judgment. She was also the most fabulous stylist of hair, clothes and food, and the most loyal and loving of friends. Her first marriage, in 1966, was to Mark Lushington, the father of her son, Jake. They divorced in 1979, and Cora married David Glover, a sociologist, in 1988. David and Jake survive her, as do her grandson, Gene, and brother, Paul.
New York Times
05-02-2025
- Business
- New York Times
How the British Art Market Went From Sublime to Ridiculous
An art dealer I know blames Ozempic for the recent slump in sales: Collectors haven't been hungry. After reading 'Rogues and Scholars,' James Stourton's erudite and authoritative history of the London art market from World War II to our century, I'm inclined to agree. Stourton, for decades a former chairman at Sotheby's UK, makes clear that, although all buying is appetitive, auctions turn personal cravings into group binges, with global effects. His Year Zero is 1958, when Sotheby's auctioned the German banker Jakob Goldschmidt's Impressionist paintings. While only seven works were offered, the black-tie crowd and TV cameras made it a spectacle. One Cézanne, sold for 220,000 pounds, set a new auction record. The night was a turning point, Stourton suggests, when auctions, formerly quiet industry affairs supplied mainly by country estates, became celebrity events. It also goaded a rivalry between Sotheby's and Christie's that endures today. Both houses dated to the 18th century, but Christie's was older, more prestigious, known for its paintings. Sotheby's, initially specializing in books, was transformed under Peter Wilson, who became chairman in 1958. A debonair unmoneyed aristocrat and former MI6 operative, Wilson understood branding and embraced pure commercialism, even licensing the firm's name for cigarettes. His rival, the Christie's chairman Peter Chance, was a former army officer, and stuffier. His firm fostered client loyalty by retaining staff, but suffered from 'lackluster expertise,' writes Stourton, until they started to recruit Cambridge art history graduates. Stourton reports the industry gossip: 'When somebody died, Peter Chance went to the funeral, and Peter Wilson went to the house.' Chance on Wilson: 'That man is a swine.' Wilson's motto? 'Leave nothing to Chance.' With improvements in travel and technology, milestones of commerce were vaulted, and each appeared to cheapen a onetime gentleman's sport. Sotheby's 1964 acquisition of the New York firm Parke-Bernet broadcast a message of 'world domination.' To attract reluctant buyers, Wilson began publishing indexes in the London Times stock pages: Renoir up, say, 405 percent, Monet up 1,000. In 1975, Wilson and Chance seemingly conspired to invent the buyer's premium, using the reduced commissions to attract sellers, appalling dealers. Such changes forced innovation among the London dealers, like the secretive Wildenstein's and Monty Bernard (who had been known to bribe train conductors to waylay rival dealers). A dense account of them canopies Stourton's tale, organized by pecking order and specialty (never have brown furniture and Victoriana read so page-turningly). For Robin Symes, the disgraced dealer of looted antiquities, 'hubris was followed by nemesis, and nobody rose higher or fell faster.' In general, Stourton lets his quotes do the judging. They spray back at their speakers like birdshot in pheasant season. The dealer Richard Green's favorite painting is 'a sold one.' 'I collect money, not art,' a Marlborough founder said. 'The only decent artist is a dead artist,' quoth the dealer Julian Agnew. An impressive number of sources spoke to Stourton, with a candor only an insider of great principle could have earned. (A dramatis personae — or a map of Mayfair — wouldn't have hurt; at times the book is a surname soup.) As prices and stakes climbed, questions of transparency, provenance, authenticity, expertise and exhibitions grew more serious. Several young dealers emerged as scrappy, even heroic connoisseurs. Living artists, notoriously risky investments, gained traction through brand-savvy galleries like Marlborough, which championed Francis Bacon and Henry Moore, and Kasmin, whose skylighted minimalist showroom was 'a machine for looking at pictures in.' Auctions began admitting living artists, too. Wilson retired in 1980, not long after hiring Stourton. By then, Japanese buyers dominated these auctions. Their bubble was to pop with the 1990 invasion of Kuwait, just as the 1970s oil crisis sent Chinese ceramic sales, and some London dealers, to Hong Kong. In 1987 van Gogh set records with a 'Sunflowers' (Christie's) and 'Irises' (Sotheby's). 'Private sales' further supplanted the role of dealers, who crowed when the two houses got caught fixing commissions in 2000, and banded together to form the art fairs we know today. The Young British Artists (Y.B.A.), Britain's last global movement, brought some American dealers calling in the 1990s, as London saw its 'gradual repositioning into second place behind New York.' But even there the duopoly has held tight, as evidenced by Sotheby's recent sale of a 35-cent banana for $6.2 million. Though impressively aware of changing tastes, Stourton is not a visual writer, and at certain moments this can frustrate the reader. The achievement of Erica Brausen, the dealer who first sold Bacon to the Museum of Modern Art, pales without a description of that painter's deliberate repulsiveness. Of the globe-quaking Y.B.A. show in 1988, one work is described. But Stourton's aloofness may be a practiced discretion. 'It would have been an appalling error of taste and intrusion into another man's privacy to go commenting on his possessions,' explains Stourton's onetime colleague Philip Hook in 'Breakfast at Sotheby's.' 'His pictures? His wine? What next, his wife?' (Also compare Stourton's Wilson with the nasty, deceitful version described in 'Rogues' Gallery' by Hook, who began at Christie's.) Stourton's approach is nonetheless truthful. Stripped of the art lover's gaze, Stourton's taut chapters and business brain probably make a clearer portrait of a traffic that, on paper, can care ironically little for looks. 'A good art dealer,' Arthur Tooth is quoted as saying, 'is a man who can sell a picture he dislikes to a client who dislikes it.' Outstanding in its own field, 'Rogues and Scholars' nears Anthony Bourdain's tell-all 'Kitchen Confidential,' whose real favor is not worship of food but an honesty about brawls and diarrhea. Perhaps by exempting beauty from his comic-epic of ploys and partners, Stourton creates an inconvenience for the casual reader but ultimately does a courtesy to the artists.
