My first review!
September 21 2015
Picture: BG
Please allow me to plug my first exhibition review, courtesy of The Financial Times, who kindly asked me to write about Simon Schama's new 'Faces of Britain' show at the National Portrait Gallery in London. You can read the article here.
The FT doesn't do star ratings, but if it had I'd have given the show 3 and a bit. When I was working in politics, if we couldn't quite determine whether something the opposition had done was good or bad, we'd say 'this is a lost opportunity', and that was slightly my impression of the NPG show. I wonder if there were budgetary or planning constraints in the way. Of course, they say that people only read reviews that are either one star stingers or five star praises. So you could say my review is neither here nor there, perhaps a bit like the show itself. But I could only say what I genuinely thought, and I hope you like it. For some reason, a sub-editor has introduced a rogue and mis-leading 'for example' in the line about Nicky Phillip's portrait of Simon Weston.
Other reviews of the show can be found here in the Telegraph and here in The Evening Standard. Schama's book seems to have fared better than the show (as here in The Guardian), though Neil Jeffares was perhaps only vaguely impressed by the book. The TV series begins on 30th September on BBC2.
