“This tremendous aggregate of a book has many of the characteristics of a Festschrift assembled to honour some Great Influencer”: so, in 1973, the architectural historian Priscilla Metcalf began the f

A shocking pink bob and bright blue eyeshadow form my first glimpse of Zandra Rhodes. Seated in her design studio in South London, Rhodes has just got back from Bath, where she has been viewing the wo

In January 1918, a few months after Lenin’s Bolsheviks had captured the Winter Palace in Petrograd, Rhoda Power left the house in Rostov-on-Don where she was employed as a governess and wandered throu

The beauty of Lancashire’s Lune valley emerges from ...

LETTERS

Picture the scene: a former NHS chef ‘Clem’ Clements is celebrating his 98th birthday, sitting in his front room surrounded by his medications, an oxygen mask and a discreet tape recorder. He is recal