Images Courtesy of VA
London’s V&A keeps churning out the blockbusters, the latest of which - opened with a live performance by Annie Lennox (blimey, those vocal pipes are strong) - is Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990 which starts with the poster; Grace Jonesas fantastically imagined by Jean Paul Goude and takes you through from the [...]

Photo Courtesy of Travelfolio.com
This writer is feeling rather old. The last time I was in Singapore, as opposed to grabbing five hours kip between flights at the transit hotel at Changhi Airport, it felt like a languid colonial city with a teaming Chinatown at its heart. Then people said it got dull. So I didn’t [...]

I love a museum-in-a-home when it feels as if the original occupants have just left. In the case of The Van Loon house in the centre of Amsterdam, in fact, they haven’t. The descendants of the family still occupy the traditional back house behind the grand stone edifice. In 1602 Willem van Loon co-founded [...]

Much more interesting than paying about 16 quid to get into the grand bits of Windsor Castle, this museum is about how ordinary people have lived - from a humble shepherd in his hut to those made homeless by the London Blitz of WWII who moved out of the city after the war and were [...]

Gustave Moreau Museum, Paris
Gustave Moreau’s Museum seems weird and stuffy. You start by going up a carpeted stair to where the French symbolist painter (1826-1898) lived and died. It’s claustrophobic, especially the salon in which the aged painter received those coming to buy his works once he was too old to climb the stairs up [...]