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 26^th January to 15^th 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.

It's been a good while since I've posted, chiefly because limited mobility has made it difficult to get to London and take part in the capital's cultural life. It seems that I need a new knee. I wish I could say that I wore out the old one by exercising it too much, by marathon-running or even ballroom dancing. But of course, however exquisite, these would be fibs. The truth is that the absence of cartilage in my right knee is the result of a car crash I had in 1957. Not only was I the bad driver, but the parents' car I totaled was a design icon, a 1951 Raymond Loewy Studebaker. 

Writing about food, eating and drinking - as distinct from how-to cookery manuals - goes back at least to antiquity, from Juvenal's biting Satires and Petronius's detailing of the excesses of Trimalchio's feast, to the dietary prohibitions of the Old Testament. It would be both interesting and a little tedious to trace food writing through the ages; however, there has always been a self-consciously literary tradition, as in Petronius's mocking exaggerations of a decadent Roman cena. In the hands of really good writers, as we've seen in our own time in the work of Elizabeth David and Jane Grigson, even collections of recipes can have literary worth - though this is exceptional, and most writers of recipes do not have literary pretensions, or even ambitions.

         Something new is happening, though. Julie Powell's Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously, which had its origins online in a blog, has turned into a movie with a magnificent role for Meryl Streep. One of the effects of this has been to make high-end food a subject for mainstream entertainment - as it has been for 25 years anyway for affluent urbanites, for whom eating out is a major leisure activity (as Social Trends reported yet again in 2006), and cooking a hobby. But perhaps the correct way to view this is as the crest of a foodie wave, in which people are thinking and writing about food in all sorts of novel ways.

Religion is a difficult subject for me. I hate it - but I'm fascinated by the details of religions - liturgical, scriptural, ceremonial, even ecclesiastical - the whole lot. I feel that all religious belief is childish and weak, and I've never understood why believing you have an Imaginary Friend, and that you can pray or talk to him should make you a happier or better person.  But it's the belief part I don't get: I'm riveted by the detail of the rituals you practice to get in touch with him, and, of course, recognize the genius of the artists, musicians and architects who claim they have been inspired by him and his sacraments, rules and the disputes these have caused. For all my militancy, I'm a sort of pious atheist, as my friend Dr. Jonathan Miller says we should all be.