Sydney Smirke's (1797-1877) design for the Round Reading Room of the British Museum made it one of the architectural landmarks of the world. Readers' tickets have been held by Marx, Lenin (who used the name Jacob Richter on his library card), Bram Stoker (of "Dracula" notoriety) and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - and me.
Since the British Library split and moved away in 1973, the glorious space has been redundant. But it has recently been used as an exhibition space for:
· The First Emperor: China's Terracotta Army 13 September 2007 - 6 April 2008
- Hadrian: Empire and Conflict 24 July- 27 October 2008
- Shah 'Abbas: The Remaking of Iran 19 February - 14 June
- Moctezuma: Aztec Ruler 24 September 2009 -24 January 2010
- Fra Angelico to Leonardo: Italian Renaissance Drawings
22 April - 25 July 2010 - Journey through the afterlife: ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead 4 November 2010 - 6 March 2011
- Treasures of Heaven: saints, relics and devotion in medieval Europe 23 June - 9 October 2011
And from the 26th January to 15th April, it is home to Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam.

19th-C Egyptian mahmal, ceremonial palanquin, symbol of the sultan's authority over the holy places (Nasser D. Khalili Collection of Islamic Art)
To be a member of the Critics' Circle in
Britain you have to have been a regularly published critic of the theatre,
music, dance, cinema or visual arts for at least two years. It's a handy form
of accreditation and, unlike the way theatre and film people and musicians are
organized, it has no aspect of trade unionism, and so is non-political and
uncontroversial - for the most part.
In
addition to the Critics' Circle overall annual award to a practitioner of one
of the arts, some of the five sections listed above give their own awards.
Yesterday was the grandest occasion, the Critics' Circle Theatre Awards for
2011. The Prince of Wales Theatre in the
West End was crammed with faces familiar from screens as well as from behind
the footlights, as so many starry British film and television actors now seem
to relish doing live theatre.

Eddie Redmayne at Awards Ceremony 24 January 2012
"We seem to be a society that celebrates all the wrong people."
Who said that? The wisest man in Britain today, Iain Duncan Smith, once caretaker leader of the Conservative Party, Work and Pensions Secretary in the current government. He chairs the cabinet social justice committee, and what he has to say about the summer urban riots is full of good sense.
In an interview with the Guardian of 9 December Duncan Smith had the guts to blame the riots on celebrity culture. Children, he said, are regarding contestants on the degraded TV programme The X Factor and doltish Premier League footballers as role models. His point is simple and obviously true: British kids think success in life is achieved by being one of these undereducated yahoos, rather than by hard work. "Kids," he said, are meant to believe that their stepping stone to massive money is The X Factor. Luck is great, but most of life is hard work. We do not celebrate people who have made success out of serious hard work."
There's something in common - besides lack of taste - between the talentless who win The X Factor and the banksters with their undeserved giant bonuses, namely being rewarded incommensurately for the amount of skill and work involved in the performance.

Ace Clicker
I've known the Indian photographer Pablo Bartholomew since the 1980s, when he accompanied me and a troupe of (mostly) French Michelin-starred chefs on our post-publication (of The Official Foodie Handbook) tour of India. Our lot included Pierre Troisgros, Michel Rostang, Alain Dutournier, Jean-André Charial, Jean Lameloise and journalists Gilles Pudlowski, Fay Maschler, Gael Greene and Craig Claiborne. But when this crew got to Goa, the local English-language newspaper heralded our arrival with the headline: "Ace Clicker in Town."
That, of course, was Pablo, then the best-known photographer in the subcontinent.
Pablo Bartholomew
This question became urgent this week when my autumn roundup of performing arts events went to press on Thursday evening for Friday's paper. The "fact-checker" (I put it in scare quotes as the title is itself redundant: if something really is a fact, it obviously doesn't need checking) altered many of the dates in my piece. Why did she do this? Because she had checked the theatre websites online, and found that many if not most of them claimed that the play began before the date I had given in my copy.
Only moments ago, watching the ITV News
account of the tsunami resulting from the earthquake in NE Japan, I heard the
announcer say that low-lying Pacific Islands were menaced - and that for many
of them this was a double blow, as some of them had previously had to be
evacuated owing to the consequences of global warming. It strikes me as odd -
and interesting - that the TV news presenter can refer to climate change in a
commonsensical, low-key way, while some global warming-deniers are still
shouting from the (metaphorical) rooftops, and while there have been two plays
in London recently struggling to deal with the climate change question: i.e.,
whether it is man-made, as no one can actually deny the fact of climate change.
The exhibition called "Modern British Sculpture" that opened at the Royal Academy today (until 7 April) is a fraud.
It's one of those shows intended to illustrate a theory or make an argument. Its publicity claims: "the exhibition takes a fresh approach, replacing the traditional survey with a provocative set of juxtapositions that challenge the viewer to make new connections and break the mould of old conceptions [my emphasis]." The trouble is that the "new connections" are so desperately old hat.

About
Paul Levy is amost a citizen of the world, carrying the passports of the USA and the UK/EU. He writes about the arts in general for the Wall Street Journal Europe more
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