Anna Tobias of Deco Cafe interviewed in The Modern House

“If I’m cooking for myself, I often make pasta. I’ll always have pasta in my cupboard, alongside tinned tomatoes, anchovies, sardines or a good tin of tuna, lemons and rice. That’s it. The basics. I’ve started making a dish that involves frying some onions, boiling some sort of greens – leeks, broccoli, chard, or whatever I have at home – and then stirring it all together with a tin of sardines. Add some lemon juice and a boiled egg and serve it with rice. It’s delicious.”

I must try this.

The older you get, the more anniversaries there are; it recently occurred to me that it’s now 50 years since I sat my A Levels… good grief! And what a simple business it all was way back then. All exams, for a start: no continuous assessment, no coursework or anything like that. Just sit in silence and write and write and write.

English literature (well, obviously); I think we’d studied eight set books and only had to write about six, so there was a choice. Othello and King Lear, Doctor Faustus, Paradise Lost 9 & 10, Chaucer’s Merchant’s Prologue and Tale, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, The Shadow of a Gunman, Andrew Marvell’s poetry… is that all of them? Don’t recall which I avoided…

French: dictation, I remember, unseen and prose translation, essay, and literature. Le Mariage de Figaro, Le Roi Se Meurt, Servitude et Grandeur…

You have come to a time when everything is loss— your parents dead, your friends dying or gone south. You have come to a time when you have money and nothing you care to do with it, though you take cruises, spoil the grandkids, redecorate the house, which, schooled in irony, echoes as if abandoned. At the end of a day in which you cannot remember whether you took the car in or got your teeth cleaned, you sit before the TV and watch people discover who murdered a woman trapped in a locked room. You ready yourself for bed like the homeless preparing to launch themselves into a cold wind. You turn on the porch light to ward off the terrors every night brings, and there in the pale glow discover a web spread from firethorn to birch. You go out in your robe, your plaid pajamas, and sit…

     This is the third book in Alberto Angela’s astonishing trilogy about life in Ancient Rome. The previous two – Empire and Les 3 Jours de Pompeii – were really good: a journey around the Roman Empire imagined through the travels of a one sesterce coin, and an hour-by-hour account of the days leading up to and immediately following the volcanic eruption which annihilated Pompeii and Herculaneum in 79CE. This one is self-evidently about the daily life and routines of the Eternal City. Angelo chooses a Tuesday some time in 117CE, when the empire was at its greatest extent.

Angela is a well-known writer and historian in Europe, not really known here although Empire is available in English as The Reach of Rome. It’s definitely popular history in its tone, rather than an academic work, but it very definitely is not dumbed-down: every article, object or…

In October 1941 Ravilious’ work as a war artist took him to Fife where he lodged with John and Christine Nash at Crombie Point Cottage near Dunfermline.

On the 20^th October he wrote to his wife Tirzah: I was so pleased to find your letters and the parcel (most welcome to Christine) when I came home today from my ship….I’m glad Ironbridge is warming up for the Essex winter………Christine has just gone off to London and possibly Wiston so may perhaps see you. She is a wonderful person in any house, and gets us all up with tea in the morning and a splendid breakfast then lights my fire if I work at home and goes off to Dunfermline for beer and cigarettes. What more could you want?

John and Christine Nash.

On the 17^th November 1941 Eric wrote to Tirzah from John and Christine Nash’s cottage at…