An Eye for Fashion, Photography by Norman Parkinson 1954-1964

Last weekend I took a stroll into the past. I was delighted to receive an invitation from our friend Angela Williams to attend the launch of an exhibition of original vintage prints by fashion photography Norman Parkinson. Angela was Parkinson’s assistant during the early sixties. When he left his Twickenham studio she asked if she could have his surplus vintage … Read More

The Memsahib of Ooty, A Passage to Kerala, part 2.

E.M Foster’s Passage to India is not simply about the domination of the Raj, it is, more importantly, about human relationships. When Foster writes in his other famous novel, Howard’s End,the words, ‘only connect’, he emphasises that it is the connections between human beings that matter most in his writing. As I sat on the Nilgili mountain railway with our … Read More

A Passage to Kerala- Episode One-Christmas to New Year

I have always been a fan of E.M Foster’s novel A Passage To India. It encapsulates the tense atmosphere that can emerge from the meeting of two very different cultures when one culture conquers and as a consequence considers itself superior to the other.In Foster’s novel this tension is presented in the central enigma of what happened in the caves … Read More