BritainBehind the scenes at the museums (and galleries) Free admission was introduced at leading British galleries and museums by the Labour government in 2001, writes Peter Watts, and is now considered a national right. Visitors increased by 83 per cent over the following five years as the big establishments embraced a new era with rare self-confidence. But with swingeing cuts coming up, what museum directors regarded as a "golden age" has come to an end, and free access could be a casualty. The system has flaws—for one, it insulates the largest museums, while smaller ones still have to charge—and it costs a fortune. But such is its popularity among the vocal classes that when shadow culture secretary Hugo Swire suggested reintroducing charging in 2007, there was a national outcry. David Cameron had to backtrack and Swire was removed from his post. Subsequently, all three main parties made explicit manifesto pledges protecting free admission. But the mood is changing. Oliver Kamm floated a balloon in the Times recently arguing forcefully for charges, while the scale of the budget cuts coming at the department for culture, media and sport is said to be so large—up to 40 per cent—that it could leave museums with little choice but to lobby for the reintroduction of some form of charging themselves. Many museum and gallery directors have been preparing for this quietly for a while, and will be quick to insist that the decision was forced upon them, but if the coalition can claim charges have been self-imposed, it will be seen as a very nifty bit of manoeuvring indeed. Are our GPs really ready to run the NHS? GPs have always been the most distinctive part of the NHS, Nigel Hawkes writes. Now they've been handed the whole show. Health secretary Andrew Lansley's white paper gives control of planning, organising and paying for £70bn a year of NHS care in England to consortia of GPs which, for the most part, don't yet exist. Where managers have failed, those largely untrained in management are expected to succeed. It's a brave move, in the Yes Minister sense of the word. About the only thing GPs won't control is their own service, for which the new NHS commissioning board will be responsible. Will it dare to do what has never been done before, and sack poor performers? General practice remains the most unexamined part of the NHS: we have little idea how good, or bad, our doctors are. (That Harold Shipman could murder 215 patients, while being regarded as a good GP, makes the point.) The new arrangements will give the worse GPs even more chance to hide. How many GPs, bound together in consortia with legal liability for the money they spend, are going to blow the whistle on their fellows? Count them on the fingers of one hand. Kit and The Widow Tony Blair is said to be furious with Peter Mandelson for the march he has stolen on him with the speedy publication of his memoir The Third Man (HarperPress). Blair's account A Journey (Hutchinson) won't be published until 1st September. But another partnership feeling the strain of competing autobiographies is Kit and The Widow, the camp cabaret double-act. This October sees the publication of The Widow's Tale (Constable). This is "the widow" Richard Sisson's account of nearly three decades of louche behaviour in public and at private parties in famous country houses (royal ones included). A somewhat miffed Kit Hesketh-Harvey's own racy memoirs won't appear until next year. But they're both troopers—don't expect a hint of conflict during their annual outing at the Edinburgh Fringe later this month. Chief of domestic strife On his appointment in mid-July as head of our armed forces, General David Richards no doubt received heartiest congratulations from everyone—except his wife. Asked in last month's interview with Prospect before the announcement what he would do if things went well and he was appointed chief of defence staff (CDS), he replied: "My wife says if they go badly and I become CDS." Let's hope he's top dog at dealing with trouble and strife of the domestic, as well as the international, kind. InternationalHollywood's bottom line The actress and singer Vanessa Paradis has received much publicity for her performance in the French romantic comedy, Heartbreaker (considered mould-breaking by some in that the heroine doesn't end up mad and/or dead as in many French films—and indeed novels). There was a buzz of interest too when it was announced that her next role was to play Simone de Beauvoir, France's most famous feminist, in an English-language film, My American Lover. It traces de Beauvoir's love affair in the 1940s and 1950s with the novelist Nelson Algren, author of The Man with the Golden Arm. Algren will be played by Johnny Depp, Paradis's longterm partner. But why should Hollywood be interested in this story just now? De Beauvoir died in 1986, Algren in 1981. The affair has been known and written about for decades and their transatlantic correspondence was published in 1998. Perhaps the answer lies in the discovery two years ago of a snap taken by US photographer Art Shay in 1952. The picture shows de Beauvoir, naked in high heels, standing in front of a mirror in the bathroom of Algren's Chicago flat. It caused a sensation when it was published on the cover of the Nouvel Observateur (below) to mark the 100th anniversary of her birth. Could it be this image which persuaded Hollywood of the dramatic possibilities of a love story between two intellectuals?
Pompeii still buried Nearly three months after Prospect raised the alarm about Pompeii and Herculaneum, writes Peter Popham, Italy's smartest daily newspaper, La Repubblica, comes galloping up the rear with dire news about the appalling condition of the archaeological sites. Echoing our story (May 2010), Alberto Custodero reports in astonishment that Herculaneum's museum has twice been inaugurated—once in 1978 and again in 1993—but never opened to the public, and points out that the most arresting finds at Pompeii, the plaster casts of the volcano's victims killed while fleeing or attempting to hide, are not on view. Custodero identifies political feuding as the main problem, with half-baked superintendents in charge while the best candidates are mysteriously ignored. While this is undoubtedly true, a more even-handed article would have also noted the tireless work being done at Herculaneum by archaeologist Andrew Wallace-Hadrill and his largely British team, financed by the American David Packard, a Hewlett-Packard heir, who are fighting to reverse the degradation caused by Italian bureaucratic sloth and stupid EU laws which, in effect, bar local experts from working on the site. Pigs might climb The mystery of the World Cup's weirdest name has been solved. Bastian Schweinsteiger, the impressive 26-year-old German midfielder, has a surname that means in literal translation "pig climber." This is either extremely insulting or a little odd. Perhaps, said various Germans consulted on the subject, it really means "pig stepper"—a sort of herder of pigs, someone who steps out with them. The truth is duller. In middle German steige means a sty, so his name means pig sty. In fact, even more prosaically, his forebears probably come from the village of Schweinsteig, south of Rosenheim. LiteratureProspect of Raine Here's a conundrum: is it still a compliment if your name is dropped in perhaps the most-panned novel of the year? Prospect found itself facing this very question courtesy of poet and debut novelist Craig Raine, whose effort Heartbreak (Atlantic) was memorably summarised by Terry Eagleton as "a novel in the sense in which Eton is a school near Slough." In the book, one of its cast, 42-year-old Steph, is sent by "Prospect magazine to interview... Paul Muldoon, Howard GB Clark 21 University Professor in the Humanities, Professor of Creative Writing in the Peter B Lewis Center for the Arts, Poetry Editor of the New Yorker and a likely prospect for the Nobel Prize in Literature." As Leo Robson observed in the TLS, this is a sentence "not entirely at home in a novel." Still, it's one to add to Prospect's book of cuttings, alongside our appearance in Joanna Trollope's Friday Nights and—a perennial office favourite—an early episode of Channel 4's Shameless. What's coming up31st July First day of the World Artistic Skydiving Championships 6th August Edinburgh Fringe Festival begins 9th August Rwandan presidential election 11th August First day of Ramadan 15th August Indian Independence Day 19th August Independence Day in Afghanistan 23rd August International day for the remembrance of the slave trade and its abolition
