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Category: George Bell

  • Melanie Barber MBE (1943-2012)

    In November I was privileged to be among the many family, friends and former colleagues who gathered at Lambeth Palace to remember Melanie Barber, former Deputy Librarian and Archivist of Lambeth Palace Library, who passed away in June. Melanie was on the staff of the Library for more than thirty years, retiring in 2002. Until…

  • Walter Hussey, patron of art

    [From the introduction to my new book on Walter Hussey ] Walter Hussey is known for an extraordinary sequence of commissions of contemporary art and music, for the church of St Matthew Northampton from 1943 and, from 1955 to 1977, for Chichester Cathedral. The names read as a roll-call of post-war artistic and musical life:…

  • The Church and Humanity: the life and work of George Bell

    There is no pleasure quite like receiving a pristine copy of a new book through one’s door; and it is doubled when the book includes some of one’s own work. So I was delighted to find a couple of weeks ago my copy of this new collection, edited by Andrew Chandler, which includes my own…

  • The visual arts in the Church of England, 1935-56

    [UPDATE (2018): the argument of this article is now substantially developed in my book on Walter Hussey. ] I’m very pleased to be able to say that my article for Studies in Church History 44 (2008) on this topic is now available online in SAS-Space. It tried to catch some of the energy of a…

  • Romantic Moderns

    I note several reviews of this recent book by Alexandra Harris: amongst others, Kathryn Hughes in the Guardian, Simon Heffer in the Spectator and Boyd Tonkin in the Independent. I’ve yet to read the book, but her tracing of another strand to the usual ‘conservative English/modernist continentals’ opposition is of some importance in relation to…