In three or four years, they should be big enough to clip into any shape.Box is an easy and cooperative plant. Like yew (Taxus baccata), it has the physical characteristics that allow it to be abused. If you pinch it out in one place, it will bush out somewhere else. By trimming it, you force it to produce buds in the vacant areas and so you can sculpt it into any shape you want. For traditional topiary, you need a frame, plonked over the plant. When first in place, you clip every stem that protrudes through the bars, and then wait for new growth to fill the mould.For funky box, you don’t need a frame.

Just go with the flow – have some flat bits, some rounds, large humps and small, like random sand dunes running beside your path. The old hedge around the Belgium designer Jacques Wirtz’s garden near Antwerp is probably the most perfect example in the world of box put to this end It’s far from artless. To clip a hedge so that it looks not like a green girder, but a naturally evolving and even breaking form – a kind of horticultural surf – takes enormous skill and a subtle eye. Wirtz found the hedge in a fairly derelict condition and he absorbed it into the garden, not by shutting it into callipers, but by adopting and exaggerating its natural form. You won’t have the creases of age in your box hedge, but pick up and exaggerate the difference between each plant. As you walk down the line, you’ll see the shapes that they want to be All you have to do is emphasise that and you’ll be there. To keep the curves pronounced, clip twice a year, once in late spring and once in the summer.

Richard believes that the paintings are what we should be looking at, not the cultural chatter in our heads about Bloomsbury. Nigel, you’ve seen the Tate show – what do you think?NIGEL JONES: Well, I think the art is very modest, and I’m glad that Richard doesn’t make any extravagant claims. And I think, to be fair, that they wouldn’t make claims to be ranked along with Matisse, or with Proust, or Kafka, whoever the people were who were writing and painting at the same time. But I wonder why, if that is the case, we still make such a hell of a fuss about them now. I think in some ways I’ve been brought in here to pee on one of Vanessa Bell’s carpets as a token anti-Bloomsbury person. I find it strange that we’re so obsessed with them.SD: But isn’t it partly that if you look too much at the life, it takes your attention away from the work.

Maybe in some ways the work was not always easy, it was difficult In some ways, modernism was difficult Hermoine?HERMIONE LEE: It depends what you take pleasure in. What I take pleasure in from the show is a conversational intimacy and a movement between high art, professional art and ordinary useful everyday domestic appliances. In those paintings you see objects which you can then see as physical objects, such as screens, chairs and plates. It’s a useful art, I think, not a useless art.RS: I think something that gets dismissed is the artists always wanting to have their works seen everywhere on a very broad basis. They weren’t the elitist snobs that you read about every day in the papers.SD: Regina, give me this from the American perspective, because to a certain extent America comes rather fresher to Bloomsbury than Britain.

You don’t have the cultural baggage that we have.REGINA MARLER: Yes it’s true that there’s a great divide in the English/ American response to Bloomsbury. Americans really knew very little about the group before the late Fifties, so they didn’t build up resistance to it. In England Bloomsbury seemed like a monolith at the heart of the art establishment. Views have been passed down: a lot of cultural commentators in the present don’t know much more about Bloomsbury than they pick up from a Sunday supplement, but they continue to mouth the standard objections to the Group.SD: So you agree with Hermione that the British are caught up in a complex dialogue with themselves about class, which the Americans can leapfrog over?RM: Yes I think it’s class. I also think there’s quite a bit of homophobia and misogyny at the root of the reaction against the Group.HL: I think it has to do with the Thirties reaction – people like Wyndham Lewis and DH Lawrence and the middle-class male academic establishment responding against these people they thought were spoilt and trivial.

But I think it’s also to do with our post-Sixties feeling about libertarianism, which I think Bloomsbury did have something to do with. The Sixties have had very bad press, and I think this is a kind of conservative reaction against the Sixties, which has to do, as Regina was saying, with homophobia and misogyny.SD: But can we return to Nigel’s point here? Why do we continue to be so obsessed by them, and what does this tell us about British culture now?NJ: I think one thing it tells us is that British culture was totally insulated and isolated from Europe, and in fact about 20 or 25 years behind Europe. When we were getting very excited about Roger Fry’s Post-Impressionist show in 1910/1911, the rest of Europe had already moved on to Cubism.HL: Surely one of the things that the Bloomsbury Group artists did was to make the English public more aware of European culture. If you come to Virginia Woolf’s critical essays, there’s also a great interest in Proust and French literature.SD: Let’s stay with Woolf for a moment, because she normally rises to the top of any discussion about Bloomsbury. Regina, how far was the American discovery of the Bloomsbury Group actually a discovery of Woolf?RM: Well, until maybe the late Sixties, few American readers knew anything about Bloomsbury. So what they learnt, they learnt from Quentin Bell, and then Virginia Woolf and her books followed.SD: Hermoine, there are dangers in lionisation aren’t there, as a way of recovering lost voices?HL: Well, there are also dangers in generalisation. Woolf is a writer who starts writing in the 1910s and finishes writing in the very early Forties.

“They are eminently suitable for any type of interior – traditional or contemporary.”Veedon Fleece, a company which specialises in modern rugs, brings out its own collection each year. The designs are diverse, ranging from a reproduction of an Arts and Crafts rug by C F A Voysey to a modern chessboard pattern. “There is a new generation of people buying contemporary carpets,” says the founder, Adam Gilchrist, who attributes this partly to people’s tendency to move house more frequently these days (unfitted carpets are easier to transport than fitted). About half of Gilchrist’s clients are aged between 30 and 45. The rest are slightly older, and are often seeking to replace worn-out antique carpets with replicas. All of Veedon Fleece’s carpets are hand-knotted in Nepal, using wool from Tibetan mountain sheep.

They can be woven up to very large sizes (24m by 8m).Helen Yardley – another pioneer in the world of contemporary carpets, and best known for her abstract creations – has noticed a change in the public’s response to her designs in recent years. “People are much more appreciative, and there is no longer that response of ‘Oh my God, it costs that much.’” The majority of her carpets, which start at pounds 400 a metre, are one-off commissions, although she also brings out a new collection of designs every year. The advantage to commissioning a carpet, she says, is that you can be assured of its uniqueness. “I particularly enjoy working with architects and being pushed in new directions.

It is important for developing my work.” Yardley cites such diverse influences as Henri Matisse, Robert Motherwell and Roger Hilton. One recent commission was a large carpet for the new Four Seasons Hotel in London. But Yardley says, “My clients are of all ages, and from all sorts of social backgrounds.”The carpet designer Sandy Jones says: “Modern carpets drag people who are stuck in the country-house aesthetic into the 20th century by enabling them to be eclectic.” A modern carpet, in fact, can sit perfectly with the country-pile look. Imagine the drawing room of a stately home, its Rembrandts complemented by a contemporary rug spread over a huge expanse of floor.In 1990, after a long career working with textiles, first in the fashion industry and then as a costume designer, Jones set up her own studio designing carpets and textiles. Although many of her carpets are in only two colours, her love of “abrash” (the subtle change in shade caused by variations in the dye) gives them a gorgeous intensity.Contemporary oriental carpets made in the traditional way, and using natural dyes, but using modernist designs, are also popular. Some of the most effective of these will be on display at the forthcoming “Natural Born Colours” exhibition of carpets and kilims (see end for details).David Black is the expert on the use of natural dyes in carpets, and has clients all over the world. In the Seventies, he was influential in promoting the merits of antique tribal and village rugs (highly sought- after once more), bringing several exhibitions to London.

If you disagree with the standards, and there are legitimate areas of disagreement, tough luck. I’m often asked what organic wine is, and whether it’s better than non- organic. The second question is easy: organic methods will not by themselves make better wine. Quality depends on skill in growing grapes and vinifying them; the job can be done well with chemical inputs It can also be done badly The first question is much more complex. An organic wine is any wine whose makers are allowed by law, and by the local certifying body, to call it by that name But EU laws differ from American laws. The winemaking countries of Europe have several organisations, each with different standards, that certify producers and (in theory) monitor their production. And some of the best producers using organic methods (such as Mas de Daumas Gassac in Herault and Domaine de Trevallon in Provence) operate outside certification systems.

It’s all a bit of a mess.
A good new book by Monty Waldin, The Organic Wine Guide (Thorsons, pounds 8.99), sets out to provide guidance for the organically perplexed. It’s genuinely useful, especially in explaining the basics and as a shopping guide. Waldin does not make extravagant claims: he sure as hell doesn’t think that all organic producers make good wine. And he elucidates the mysterious regimes of Biodynamics, an offshoot of organics that sounds like moonshine but produces some great wine. Or you might prefer to put your nine quid towards the cost of Jancis Robinson’s Oxford Companion to Wine (pounds 40), which has just been published in a new edition.

Matters of organicity are dealt with here in all their complexity, and with a well-informed scepticism that’s preferable to waving the green flag.If you’re serious about investigating the possibilities of organic wine, the best places to go are the mail order specialists Vintage Roots (0118 976 1999) and Vinceremos (0113 257 7545). But please remember that you’re not necessarily buying better quality. Think about the flavours in the glass, not just the residues.Here’s a small sampler of good organics to come my way recently. Majestic’s new list sticks a green triangle next to each organic wine, which go up to the outstanding Chassagne-Montrachets from Fontaine-Gagnard (from pounds 19- pounds 24). More affordably, their Sauvignon de Touraine 1998, Domaine des Maisons Brulees (pounds 4.99) is a grassy quaffing wine of velvety texture. California’s Fetzer is the most widely distributed of organic wineries, and their Bonterra Viognier 1998, North Coast (pounds 9.99, Oddbins) is a complex, peachily appetising example of the grape.

All their wines are good, especially the Zinfandel and Cabernet Sauvignon.Even more worth it, but only if you store the bottle for a good few years, is Chateauneuf-du-Pape “La Bernardine” 1997, Chapoutier (pounds 17.95, Waitrose). There’s some discussion about how closely this inconsistent house adheres to organic principles, but who cares? This wine’s massive, closed, exceptional – expensive but not overpriced. Another five years should show what it’s really made of.I have to admit that the whole issue of organic wine seems a bit of a red herring. Do I want to drink wine that’s loaded with pesticide residues? Of course not.

I cannot tell you how grateful I feel to this country and its people. But when I told them of my plans to be a boxer they just laughed I guess they thought I was crazy. But one guy did take me seriously and brought me a book about the career of Prince Naseem Hamed They said he was a Yorkshire lad who had made good He didn’t look Yorkshire to me. But I was fascinated by his style of boxing and his great self-confidence.”Then I noticed the name of the place where he had been taught to fight as a child, a boys’ club in Sheffield.

I decided that if it was good enough for Prince Naseem then it was good enough for me. I took a bus to Sheffield and just knocked on the door.”I expected them to tell me to clear off, but they just opened the door and told me to come in. I looked around and saw all those kids banging away at punchbags, skipping to the music and sparring in the ring It felt as if I had arrived at the place where I belonged. It felt like coming home.”Brendan Ingle remembers that moment, too There was never any question of turning him away Ingle never turns anybody away. For more than 30 years the Dublin-born former professional boxer has been taking in the waifs and strays of Sheffield. He doesn’t care if they are potential champions or born losers.

He doesn’t mind if they are mentally disabled, crippled, orphaned or simply young hooligans sent by the probation services. He believes that he can do something with any kid – and that, as the Jesuits used to put it, if he gets a boy before the age of seven, “He’s mine for ever.”He is always searching for his own version of perfection. (“I’m always on the lookout for my own Muhammed Ali, who will make me millions and set me up for life.”) But he doesn’t really care if his kids are hopeless fighters “I take them all,” he said. “If they come in here and do what they’re told, they can stay.

He was born in 1891, to French immigrant parents, in Rotherhithe, among the docks of east London. His father was himself a professional photographer, who spent much of his time taking pictures for the police of corpses fished from the river or seamen discovered near the wharves with their throats cut. By the time he was seven, Jarche was assisting him.
He was also throwing himself with great gusto into life in this tough, volatile environment. Encouraged by the local stevedores, he eventually became a talented wrestler At the age of 18 he was World Amateur Middleweight Champion.

He also developed a skill as a ventriloquist, mimic and magician – his party piece was doing imitations in German, French, Italian and Spanish, without knowing a word of any of them.But the photography he had learnt from his father offered the greatest potential to satisfy his natural curiosity, and the expansion of the Edwardian “ha’penny newspapers” drew him towards journalism. In 1909, he submitted a photograph to the Mirror, and it was published. In 1910, working for a picture agency, he waited for two days and nights in a damp field near Dover to photograph the aviator Bleriot completing his epic cross-Channel flight. His career really took off in 1912 when he joined the Daily Sketch, where he stayed as a staff photographer until 1929. Subsequently, he worked for over 20 years for Odhams Press, both for the Daily Herald and, later on, for the magazine Weekly Illustrated (later Illustrated). He ended his career at the Daily Mail, retiring in 1959.Most newspaper picture departments keep day-books which record every story a photographer has covered.

Jarche’s entries in the Daily Herald archives give a dizzying sense of his energy – and a bird’s-eye view of early-20th-century history. Dipping in at random, we find that his camera looked at the manufacture of penicillin, learning to type, taking X-rays at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, making fireworks, electrical demonstrations, developing the jet engine, dancing the can-can, digging for coal, unemployment at Govan shipyards, life in Hyde Park, copper-works in Swansea, beauty contests at the seaside, chemical laboratories, motor-racing, expanding the London Underground, ramblers in the countryside, Roman pageants, Kipper Girls in Scotland and Father Christmas at Selfridges. Add to this the fashion, the news stories – Amy Johnson and her airplane, King George V’s coronation, the launching of the Queen Elizabeth liner – and the hundreds of celebrity portraits, and you begin to get an idea of what a prolific career he had, and of why his work is significant: if not as photography, then as history.Most press pictures at that time were arranged rather than caught in a candid manner, because camera equipment was so cumbersome, and Jarche rarely veered from that tradition. Indeed, much of his work on the Herald had a relentless jollity to it. One of his most surprising and funny pictures shows sound-effects men at work backstage at a theatre, but even this, one suspects, was set up to describe the humour of the idea rather than the innate visual comedy of the situation.

Classical music began before recordings, and artists did very well. Recording was only the icing on the cake.” He then launches into a speech about music being essentially a live art-form. ” I don’t feel sorry for artists who can’t record, because that’s not what they should be about. They’re about playing in front of the public.”It has been muttered before, but now for the first time it is official: for the big labels, recording the core repertoire is largely a thing of the past. Unfortunately it’s getting harder to find core-repertoire projects worth recording.” Because of the excellent stuff in Sony’s library? “Exactly.

We should be happy it exists and is available for remastering with the newest.”So where does that put living artists who don’t hit the magic marketing button? “Out of the game.” What will this do to their lives? “I assume they have lives beyond the recording studio. I want to make records that break new ground, that have an impact.”With Charlotte Church and Titanic appearing on Sony’s “classical” label, is he bothered that the balance may become fatally skewed? “The balance will be determined by what are the most interesting projects. I’m not interested in making records that no one’s going to listen to I don’t consider our label to be archival. But that’s what it takes.”"It’s not that we’re suppressing recordings of the core repertoire, but we have to be motivated in a way that makes sense. Two years ago, after Shine, I would never have dreamed of recording a new Rachmaninov’s Third.

But when our pianist Arkady Volodos said he wanted to do it – and when we listened to him play it – we decided his version was distinctive enough to be worth recording, both artistically and commercially. “What traditionally happens with a new symphonic work is that it’s played once by an orchestra, and never heard again. We are helping both to create new music, and to deliver it to new audiences.”Does all this mean that he can afford to depend less on core classical recordings? “We can’t afford to depend on them at all If we did, we’d be out of business But if we see an opportunity, we pursue it. But lest we imagine that Sony is merely cashing in, he wants us to know that both Corigliano and Tan Dun have been writing to Sony commissions; he points out that the violin concerto which Hilary Hahn is now premiering is the result of yet another. And since the concert tour is allowing the record-buying public to make the connection, this is good news for everyone.” Especially for Sony.
Though he does not expect it to rival the soundtrack for Titanic – Sony’s biggest coup – he predicts that the Fantasia soundtrack will be a “standout success” in the forthcoming year. It will follow in the footsteps of John Corigliano’s soundtrack for The Red Violin (100,000 copies sold), and will smooth the path for Topsy-Turvy.

On Claude’s behalf, she is alleged to have approached the Members Services Unit in Millbank but was told that the system was busy with other tasks and the request could not therefore be processed in time.Panorama asserts that Margaret McDonagh – the General Secretary of the Labour Party – was then contacted by another Labour Party official and asked if she could assist in getting the lists more quickly. The explanation was then refined to include MEPs, who cover the whole of London.The BBC found that this was a smokescreen. Within days of Frank announcing that he was standing as a Labour candidate, Linda Smith, a political assistant to Claude Moraes, a Labour MEP for London and an active Frank Dobson supporter, asked Millbank for the London membership list. It also means that Frank does not need to take advantage of this service, saving him the handling charge of pounds 3,000 for each of the two permitted mailshots. That is to say, because Frank’s campaign has the membership lists already, he would save pounds 6,000, or one tenth of the final expenditure limit.Panorama set itself the task of investigating precisely how this democratic deficit came about.

Previously questioned by journalists and party members as to how they obtained the lists, Frank’s spokespeople said that they had been passed to them by various sympathetic MPs. This was quickly exposed as false because – among others – both Glenda’s constituency members and my own were mailed and telephone polled. This means that Glenda and I are still unable to obtain names, phone numbers, or addresses of members, so we are still prevented from campaigning on equal terms. It means that he can continue to direct mail the key electorate while Glenda and I have to rely on the scatter-gun method of sending our literature to constituency secretaries, in the hope that they themselves will then pass it on. This, it hardly needs saying, is totally unsatisfactory.In response, Millbank has argued that every candidate is entitled to two mailings to the membership, which will be administered centrally by the party We supply the literature, they send it out. By anybody’s standards that is a manifestly unfair basis on which to conduct a ballot.

It means that Frank is able to organise telephone canvassing on a grand scale. I am going to study the transcripts of the Panorama programme carefully, to see whether I should be taking any further steps.For those not versed in this seemingly arcane dispute, the key issue here is that one candidate has the lists of party members, with their address details, and two do not. This is devastating for the Millbank Tendency’s strategy of throwing huge resources behind their candidate. It is a revealing insight into the views of party members even though the Frank Dobson campaign has benefited from full access to membership lists, anti-Livingstone rallies addressed by the Prime Minister, vitriolic campaign leaflets, extending the length of the contest and apparently relaxing the expenditure limits.Panorama’s central charge was that senior officials in Millbank assisted Frank Dobson in obtaining the membership lists of the Greater London Labour Party. The first members’ ballot shows this does not appear to be working. Glenda has not been smashed despite all the resources being poured into Frank’s campaign.

Tooting Constituency Labour Party announced late on Monday night the results of their poll of members. The results will be sent to their MP, MEPs and GLA candidate, each of whom will cast a block vote around 1,000 times larger than that of an ordinary party member.
I polled 66.4 per cent, compared with 22.9 per cent for Frank Dobson Glenda Jackson polled 10.6 per cent. “Politics is about making sure that you have the right processes to arrive at the result that enables you to do a job of work,” argued Paul. MONDAY’S Panorama programme “The Blair Mayor Project” was a devastating expose of the campaign to prevent Labour Party members in London from selecting a candidate of their choice for mayor on a level playing field.

How else are we to prepare the nation’s youth for its European future?. THANK GOD for Noam Chomsky. In a West ever more saturated by “safe” reporting, by dog-like support for governments who embark on “moral” wars, he is a unique figure: brave, intelligent and independent. Little wonder that no newspaper in America will give him a regular column His latest book proves why.

In the familiar phrase, we are what we eat, so let’s not stop with chips and beans. Drop that boring steak and kidney pie; our schools should be serving duck confit with polenta. Away with semolina and rice pudding; replace them with tiramisu and candied fruits. Labour’s big idea here is that the content of the regulations should be “food-based” rather than “science-based”, so as not to bother the pretty heads of the nation’s dinner ladies and caterers with the counting of vitamins, carbohydrates, minerals and the rest. Well, we find those lists of nutritional elements pretty daunting, too, but surely the Government could be more Third Way-ish when it comes to dictating what they are calling “ingredients for success”.

“MORE CHIPS, please.” We will be hearing less of that familiar cry if Nanny Labour gets her familiar way. Yesterday a House of Commons committee criticised the Government’s intention to restrict the number of chips and beans the nation’s children can expect on their school dinner plates. In accordance with the draft regulations on meal standards, due to come into force next September, children may be served chips and beans only three times a week. This should take leaderships entirely out of the devolved process, to the relief of Mr Hague, if not necessarily that of Mr Blair. It would be up to the wider electorate to make what they will of Livingstone’s policies, Archer’s fibs or Shagger’s, er, shagging.As ever the Yanks have got there before us, and given us several pointers as to what not to do.

This created productions of greater depth and stimulated actors and audiences alike, nowhere more so than in Uncle Vanya at the enterprising Mercury Theatre Colchester, and Trevor Nunn’s NT revival of Gorky’s Summerfolk. That isn’t positive criticism, it’s censorship.So with that in mind, was 1999 a vintage year? Not for new plays it wasn’t. Christmas came early with turkeys to spare from the likes of Stephen Poliakoff, Snoo Wilson and Hanif Kureishi, whose thinly disguised rehash of his novel Intimacy, entitled Sleep With Me, is up there with Rod Stewart’s “Do You Think I’m Sexy?”, ie the answer’s “No”.The best news was the bandying about of the long-lost concept of “ensemble”. Throw heaps of colour at a stage and awards will be yours.5 Plays: the write stuffAlmost everyone confuses production and text. Endless Best Play gongs go to lousy scripts dressed up in flashy staging (see 1) or disguised by a huge performances (see 2).

The other besetting sin is voting for a play’s ideas/themes rather than the effectiveness of their dramatic expression, ie “we like what this playwright is saying”. It’s producing relaxed, simple, clear, engaging emotion on stage that’s hard.3 No laughs pleaseProvoking laughter isn’t deemed “serious” enough to win awards. Unlike tragic acting, which is supposedly hard work and worthy of commendation, making people laugh is seen as a gift, so where’s the skill? The exceptions are Maggie Smith and highly deserving Evening Standard winner, Janie Dee.4 Design: more sets please, we’re BritishThe flashier the better This applies across the board. Good designers know that the real job is to capture the idea, movement and tone of a play, but awards panels like sets, ie grand-scale interior design. Similarly, most lighting prizes go to highly visible work, yet designers argue that if you notice their effects, then something’s wrong. This skews awards – not to mention millennial “Best of…” lists – in the following manner:
1 Directing: big is bestMost people think that directing is solely about staging, so the deployment of a cast of thousands will always win over the carefully controlled subtlety of a chamber piece.2 Acting: the bolder the betterForget subtlety, acting awards go to gut-wrenching, scenery-chewing roles, but as any actor will tell you, huge emotions are easy.