The first thing I decided to do on returning from Belgium was a long-deferred visit to the Kederminster Library in the church of St Mary in Langley Marish. I’ve wanted to visit here for a while, but have never had the time. The first thing of interest is the Kederminster family pew, a decorated box that screened the family off from the church. Sermons would only have been watched through a confessional style grill, which may be why the interior is decorated with eyes and the message that god is watching even if the vicar wasn’t. Through this pew, there’s the library, a decorated room where all the bookcases are covered in decorative motifs, from rural scenes to grotesques. Once the bookcases are opened, the door interiors prove to also have books drawn on them. The books themselves are theological, bound in calfskin and lambskin, which still feels soft even now. The rest of the church is also rather odd; Tudor tomb monuments compete for space with green man corbels and giant heraldric crests.

Zola’s The Ladies Paradise is a quite extraordinary novel; a hymn to a capitalist modernity from a writer who was to write a novel (Germinal) two years later denouncing it and calling for its destruction; "an age that offered so many possibilities, when the whole century was pressing ahead to the future.". When one of the characters warns Mouret that continuing to pour money into the store will fail to have a return in time, another novel would have used that to set the stage for a financial crash – but not here. Whereas in Germinal, capitalism destroys lives, here commercial and personal progress go hand in hand, with Denise persuading Mouret to introduces more rights for staff on top of pay that is already in excess of what anyone could have earned with their own shop. Although Mouret’s store is depicted as destroying small businesses, creating neuroses in the customers who turn to kleptomania ("a sensual pleasure necessary to her existence") and being brutal to its staff ("wasn’t she once more going to assist the machine which was crushing the poor?"), it’s a much more even handed depiction than in The Belly of Paris ("he was merely carrying out the task of his epoch"). The depiction of women is also rather different to the average Zola novel, where they are usually virtuous and downtrodden or debauched and immoral. Mouret’s attitudes begins as one of misogyny and exploitation; "he would throw them away like empty sacks on the day when they had finished helping him make his fortune…of the supreme importance was the exploitation of women… the brutality of a jew selling woman by the pound" But the novel immediately questions where the power lies; "Woman was queen.. the women reigned supreme… the salesmen had become their slaves," something confirmed by Denise’s eventual conquest of Mouret.

McCarthy’s Remainder is built around a narrator who sees reality as mediated and inauthentic undertake a series of re-enactments in order to "allow me to be fluent, natural, to merge with actions and objects until there was nothing separating us." There’s an obvious paradox there that, such re-enactments only increase the sense of inauthenticity as with the narrator’s insistence that the frying of liver smells of cordite, whicb he admits to never having encountered. When one of McCarthy’s ‘actors’ comments that "if you don’t want to repeat things, you’ve got to understand them," it acts as an indictment of its narrator who is trapped into an experiental loop. By the end, when the narrator has decided to undertake a real bank heist rather than a re-enactment, he notes that in one sense all that happens is something he has done over and over again already. When the elaborately planned logistics fail precisely because reality was not like the enactments (ironically because a carpet lacks a bump in it), the narrator comments "he wanted everything to be perfect, neat, wanted all matter organized and filed… matter’s what makes us alive." Not, one might observe, that there is great deal of surplus matter in the novel, which is logistically pinned down as any of the novel’s re-enactments.

As such, the novel could be described as a sort of &quotanti-against-nature." It could be, but in practice, McCarthy’s actors spend as much time in the course of artificiality as Huysman’s do. In practice, the number of experiences available to us has swelled but are increasingly mediated and inauthentic. As Zizek puts it; "precisely because the universe in which we live is somehow a universe of dead conventions and artificiality, the only authentic real experience must be some extremely violent, shattering experience." It’s a theme that McCarthy skirts around but doesn’t really address in a novel that is in itself re-enacting a set of stances from modernist literature. If a novel On Chesil Beach has some obvious stylistic influences from James that would seem to be as far as the influence goes, whereas the spirits of Camus and Robbe-Grillet hang rather more heavily behind Remainder. The demonstratively undemonstrative protagonist reminds us of Camus’s Meursault, and his phenomenological alienation of Sartre’s Roquentin, while the endless replaying of events immediately reminds one of Robbe-Grillet’s Jealousy.

Belgium is arguably the European country that Britain most resembles. Both are small countries composed of a mish-mash of different nationalities who don’t like each other very much, both are predominantly bourgeois and suburban in their outlook, with a horrendous history of imperialism behind them and a multicultural present in front of them. Ceci n’est pas on pays, might be a good motto for both of them. Both regard beer, steak and chips as the height of culinary excellence and both studiously cultivate eccentricity as a national characteristic in spite of actually being as dull as dishwater. Both had a history of rapid industrialisation in cities like Ghent and Manchester, matched by both undergoing an equally rapid postwar decline. Both have a history of monarchs with dubious and repellent views who still seemed to maintain an inexplicable level of popular support. They even resemble one another in all sorts of small ways, like the red postboxes that grace the streets of both countries. Of course, rather stark differences also apply. Brussels looked towards Paris as its architectural role model, with Second Empire architecture shading into joyous outbursts of art nouveau that are difficult to conceive of in England. Statues in Britain are in bronze or stone, Belgium prefers copper. Belgium unavoidably had to look outwards to its neighbours while Britain remained insular. Where Britain created a national mythology where Britons would never be slaves, Belgium had repeatedly been invaded and ruled by almost every single other European country; Spain, Austria, France, the Netherlands and Germany.

Nonetheless, of all the European cities I’ve been to, Brussels is the one that most resembles London. Both cities are semi-disconnected from their host country with a population that is vastly more ethnically diverse and with economies that are equally disconnected, both having a high preponderance of international businesses in areas like financial services. Both have grandiloquent and bombastic landmarks juxtaposed to singularly drab modern buildings and skyscraper cities – ‘Bruxellisation’ as a syndrome applies equally to either city. To take a more provincial example, Bruges is often referred to as the ‘Venice of the North,’ but in truth the parallel has little to it beyond the presence of canals in both. Where Venice is locked into a death struggle with the corroding salt waters of the lagoon and the taint of decay is difficult to miss, Bruges simply looks rather neat, tidy and efficient, more like Delft or an English cathedral city than anything else (with the lion and bear heraldry it actually rather resembles Warwick). The resemblance is not that surprising, as the presence of a large British colony in nineteenth century Bruges accounts for much of the city’s appearance, with plaster being scraped off walls to reveal bare stones while neo-classical buildings were replaced with neo-gothic. Pugin’s ideas were as influential as Viollet le Duc’s. Louis Delacenserie and George Gilbert Scott would have got on well with each other, both having built careers on tinkering with insufficiently medieval buildings. The main difference lies with the Catholic icons and statues gracing every street corner, although the statue of Jan Nepomuk above one of the bridges brings Prague to mind rather more than Venice.

I leave Britain on the Eurostar; travelling by train certainly makes for a rather more civilised trip than by plane. The first thing I come to in Bruges is the Basilica of the Holy Blood. Built around a phial of clotted blood makes for a suitably antediluvian premise reinforced by a dark exterior that is only enlivened by guilding. Inside, the crypt is Romanesque with some grisly Spanish style statues depicting the crucified Jesus, but the chapel itself is brightly coloured and could easily be a Victorian gothic revival design (much of the chapel is indeed the work of William Brangwyn, a although in Bruges it can be rather difficult to work out what is medieval gothic and what is gothic revival). The same thought comes to be in the adjacent gothic hall, which reminds me even forceably of Cardiff castle and the main hall there; both are lavishly decorated with images of local history. In this case, Jan Van Eyck and Hans Memling look down from the walls alongside the various royal families that have ruled. The adjacent renaissance chambers though do remind me more of Venice and the Doge’s Palace though. The two main churches in Bruges often seem rather disappointing, faded and decayed; it’s the one place where the mythology of Bruges La-Morte seems to hold force. The church of Our Lady has the distinction of holding a Michaelangelo sculpture of the Virgin and Child as well as various Romanesque angel drawings and the gold mortuary sculptures of Mary of Burgundy and Charles the Bold. The gold reliquary of Charles the Good is in the nearby cathedral, that probably being its most distinctive feature.

Going further abroad, the Jerusalem Church is one of the oddest buildings I’ve come across. Modelled on the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, it’s split on three levels with a lower tomb modelled on Golgotha, the normal church building at ground level and an upper section presumably designed to show the way to heaven. The altar is a gruesome affair, with three skulls embedded in it and three crosses pointing upwards. The main floor is dominated by a black marble tomb with various other monuments lining the wall; quite most gothic of churches, which makes the fact that it’s combined with a lace museum somewhat incongruous. By contrast, the nearby church of St Anna is pure baroque, with one wall dominated by a painting of the Last Judgement. Wood carving seems a particular Belgian speciality, with wooden angels flanking the confessionals and churches often having bizarrely elaborate pulpits with birds and palm trees carved in wood. The church of St Walburga too could very well have been built in Rome. The far north-east of the city is ringed with a line of windmills next to the former moat. As the day closes I walk southwards and out of one of the medieval city gates towards the nineteenth century cemetery. Belgian graves are often commemorated with large stone slabs with stone picture frames of the deceased built into them and partly covered in layers of moss. If the design is rather more sombre than British cemeteries, the skull motifs are rather more macabre while the ornate iron crosses remind me of the ones I saw in Poland last year.

The following day is taken up with a visit to St John’s Hospital. Amongst the contents are a colourful plate with a sculpture of St John the Baptist’s head on it. The highlight is a Hans Memling altarpiece though, with the Virgin Mary flanked by an odd choice of the death of St John the Baptist on one side and the Book of Revelations on the other. Due to the closure of the main art gallery, this is joined by Hieronymous Bosch’s version of the apocalypse. There’s also a reliquary shrine for St Ursula, with Memling miniatures embedded in each gold panel. I rather prefer the portrait of a Bruges merchant though. The nearby Gruuthuse also rather reminds me of Cardiff Castle; I’ve seen skybridges into churches from palaces or the presence of royal boxes, but one passage in the Gruuthuse leads directly to a set of windows looking into the Church of Our Lady.

As some of the galleries in Bruges prove to be shut, I decide to spend a day in Ghent. In contrast to Bruges it looks rather rundown, more like Birmingham than Winchester. The train station is rather beautiful though, its atrium decorated with a set of mosaics of other Belgium cities including Burges and Ostend. The churches here are generally rather more impressive than those in Bruges, with their interiors done in a gentle redbrick that contrasts to their dark grey exteriors. The cathedral is most noted for its Jan Van Eyck triptych; unfortunately away for restoration while I was there. I note the series of paintings of past Bishops, something I’ve not seen in Britain. Like many Belgian churches, its quire is decorated in while and black marble with a series of grisaille paintings on its walls. The crypt is rather extensive, with several Romanesque paintings surviving on the walls. From the exterior, St Bavo’s is rather less impressive than the nearby St Nicholas, whose nave is lined with marble statues (tied to the adjacent columns, presumably in case any of the statues decide to run off). St Michael’s church is perhaps the most ornate and decorative of the churches I visit with colourful wall decorations and statues of saints such as a particularly fey Sebastian. I note that hatchments also seem prevalent in Belgian churches, something else I’ve not generally seen outside Britain.

Ghent is also notable for the rather dark Gravensteen castle, which owes its survival to having served as a prison in later years. It presently holds an exhibition of medieval weaponry, torture instruments and armour. I also ascend the town’s Belfort, notable for copies of the iron dragon that serves as its weathervane and of the watchmen that stand at the tower’s four corners. There is then the ruins of St Bavo’s abbey, where the skeleton of the abbey’s structure are supplemented by a range of decaying sculptures and architectural elements. Tombstones, finials, stone suits of armour and images of the virgin abound. The interior of the abbey also has its walls lined with tombstones in what is otherwise a cavernous and empty space. Finally, I had a somewhat rushed visit to the Museum of Fine Arts. The medieval collection is especially good, with Bosch’s paintings of Christ on the Cross and St Jerome, Weyden’s painting of the Virgin and a host of Brueghels. I particularly like a trompe l’oeil by Gijsbrecht showing letters pinned to a wall and Van Vliet’s church interiors. In the nineteenth century, Theo Van Rysselberghe and Emile Claus’s works made a particular impression on me. A solitary Kokoschka and a Magritte represent the best of modernism, along with a Delvaux.

In due course, I move on to Brussels. As I mentioned above, this is perhaps more like London than anywhere else I’ve been to, although it’s odd to see derelict old seventies tower blocks and ruined houses in the centre alongside skyscrapers and in otherwise prosperous districts. The first thing I visit is the Palais De Justice. It’s covered in scaffolding when I visit and much of the exterior seems to be crumbling with buddleia sprouting out of the cracks. I accidentally walk in through the wrong door and quickly see that rumours about its labyrinthine character are correct; walking in through the correct entrance results in an entrance hall that must be one of the largest interior outside of a cathedral. Built to awe the working class district below, it reminds me of nothing so much as Ceaucescu’s Palace of the Parliament; certainly the size of the country appears to hold an inverse relationship to the size of its buildings. From the square outside, you can see over to the other size of Brussels and the building that dominates the other end of the city, the Koekelberg basilica. A somewhat ugly building designed in ‘expressionist gothic’ and built from a queasy mix of green copper and dull brown brick, its size seems out of all proportion to it use. The interior is lacking in decoration and is largely defined by its darkness and emptiness. Returning to the Palais, the square outside is home to a pair of rather crumbling twentieth century war memorials; these are not uncommon here and are certainly preferable to London’s endless parade of heroic military statues. The same applies to the Colonne du Congres, an elaborate affair that reminds me of an ornate version of Nelson’s column but with an eternal flame to the fallen soldier at the base. I walk onwards from there to Notre Dame du Sablon, one of the smaller but more elaborate gothic churches.Some of the tomb designs are particularly macabre here. Further along again is the Church of Saint Jacques sur Coudenberg, a contrasting vision in neo-classical white. Finally, I visit the cathedral. Here and in all of these churches, I’m amazed at the quality of the stained glass. The treasury contains an especially grisly anatomical collection, such as the skull of Saint Elizabeth of Hungary as well as an ornate set of black and white monuments. Walking past some of the medieval city walls, I finally come to St Jean Baptiste au Beguinage, a somewhat austere neo-classical affair but which has a bizarrely large number of skull tombstones.

The following day begins with exploring the Grand Place, with it’s gothic town hall. From there I pass onto the Porte de Hal. Whereas the city gates in Bruges didn’t look terribly different from similar gates in Britain, this one looks as much like a castle in its own right. Afterwards, I go hunting for art nouveau houses in the Brussels suburbs. Where Britain emphases uniformity, Belgium prefers diversity with each house on a street looking different. Whereas in Barcelona or Prague a modernist or cubist villa represents a break with its surroundings, the difference is rather less marked in Brussels, particularly since art nouveau is essentially only a decorative style. Horta’s later buildings are often fairly similar in structure to his earlier ones, but the absence of art nouveau decoration turns them into something more prosaic. As such, I begin at the Horta Museum. The dining room with its tile lined walls strikes an odd note; the tiles remind one of a shop but the arched bas-reliefs make it seem more like a church or crypt. Like Gaudi’s villas, the centre of the house is the stairwell, which becomes lighter as one progresses upwards to a top-floor where mirrors create the effect of an infinite recursion of stairwells. From then, I go to the north of Brussels to the Maison Autrique. This particular district seems to be mostly Turkish now, with a beautiful tiled mosque. There’s also the domed church of Saint Mary’s, a building with a somewhat unfortunate history; as a restoration was nearing completion a fire sent it back to square one. Today, the domed interior makes it one of Brussels’ finest buildings, but many of the side chapels do nonetheless look rather dilapidated. If the Horta Museum was rather crowded, Maison Autrique is deserted, which is quite the best way to discover it. I even have to ring the bell to be let in. Inside, much of the exhibition design has been done by Francois Schuiten and accordingly turns out to have a giant camera in one room and a peephole in a door look into a strange world with analytical engines therein. I’m amused to discover that one of Horta’s villas is now the Cuban embassy, but begin to conclude that in several ways I prefer Paul Hankar’s designs, with their sgraffito drawings.

I have a meal in the gardens of the former botanical gardens. It’s rather pleasant, although some of the sculptures are rather odd, such as a crocodile wrestling with a snake. I try to visit the Horta pavilion in the Cinquantenaire park, which contains a sculpture of unspeakable horror and depravity. That may be why the pavilion turns out to be shut. The park also contains a triumphal arch and the Belgian equivalent of the Imperial War and Victoria & Albert museum; more super-sized structures. After this, I take out a tram out to the Colonial Museum in Tervuren. I don’t think I’ve ever ridden on a tram that goes through woodland before. Some of the museum highlights included a masked statue of an assassin from a thugee style cult and a longboat. Later on, I briefly have a look at the Comic Museum Centre, a former Horta designed department store, where everything is based around a central courtyard with glass lined floors. It all seems rather more elegant than Paul Saintenoy’s Old England store, although that building’s use of iron and elevators at the centre must have seemed more futuristic at the time.

The following day is mostly given up to the Musee de Beaux Arts. The main hall has a set of symbolist paintings by Montald and sculptures by Meunier. Walking beyond it into the medieval section, more merchant portraits by Weyden and Memling figure as well as a set of Cranach’s. Brueghel’s Fall of the Rebel Angels is as strange as anything in Bosch, with its horde of oddly piscatory rebel angels, but I still prefer works like The Fall of Icarus, The Massacre of the Innocents or The Enrollment of Bethelehem. I really can’t bring myself to like Rubens, which only leaves a Rembrandt portrait, Fetti’s Melancholie and some Guardi and Panini cityscapes in the seventeenth century section. The neo-classical section is very strong, with David’s Death of Marat. Nineteenth century Belgium seems to have been particularly keen on social realism, as with Laermans and Meunier. Symbolism seems to have been the next vogue, with Khnoppf and Delville. More surprisingly, a Burne Jones crops up in this section. This is followed by impressionism and pointillism, as with Claus, Rysselberghe and Signac. One of the Claus paintings of London rather recalls a similar Monet painting. The modern section has another solitary Kokoschka, various Delvauxs and a Dali (a temptation of St Anthony that rather mirrors all the medieval treatments of the same theme elsewhere in the museum). From the contemporary artists, I like Pistoletto’s Green Curtain showing a curtain painted on a mirror, and rather reminding me of Magritte’s curtain designs and some of the trompe l’oeil designs I’d seen in Ghent. Lastly, there is Magritte. For all of his connections with surrealists like Ernst, Magritte often seems to be as much of a post-structuralist, dealing with the connections between words and images and the differance produced by the substitution of an image in a particular context for another quite different one, such as a nightime street and a day time sky. Where Dali has his own personal mythology that forms the backbone of his symbolism, it’s more doubtful whether Magritte’s symbols represent anything as such.

The following day is given up to a visit to Antwerp. One of the main things I had wanted to see was the train station itself, an extraordinary structure by Delacenserie split over four levels and with an enormous ticket hall that resembles a basilica. Another example of Belgian grandiloquence. Although Leipzig is supposed to be a largest train station in Europe, Antwerp is clearly the more impressive. Walking into the centre I briefly visit Antwerp’s counter reformation baroque church, Saint Charles Borromeo, complete with elaborate wood carvings and stucco ceilings. From there, I pass onto the other thing I’d wanted to see, the cathedral. Many of the side chapels have been restored to their original colours but the ceiling of the main nave remains a gleaming white. Given the delicate Brabant gothic of the building, some of the counter reformation elements seem rather odd, such as the fresco on the crossing ceiling. Many of the paintings were removed to the fine arts museum after the French had abolished the guild altars they belonged to; however, many of them are back on loan, including works by Metsys and Rubens. I have a meal on the Grand Place and walk along the river side, by the old Victorian fish markets and the mock-gothic ship museum. From there it’s onto Saint Paul’s church and its bizarre Calvary Garden; rows of angels and saints line the paths up to a recreation of Golgotha and the fires of hell. Things like this do give Jonathan Meades comment about the Catholic death cult being at its worse in the gothic north a certain force. By contrast, the interior is gleaming white, only broken up by the Rubens paintings lining the walls. Finally, I look at St Jacob’s church, a somewhat dowdy church where Rubens is buried. It’s also worth mentioning another of Belgium’s super-sized structures; the KBC tower, Europe’s first skyscraper.

The last day in Belgium begins with the Atomium. It’s an odd picture of something that still looks rather futuristic but also rather resembles a Butlins holiday camp at the same time. It has an exhibition of the world fair it was built for inside along with a rather worthy section of Belgian immigration. I then go for a walk in the surrounding parkland to the Leopold Monument, a gothic folly that rather reminds me of a simpler version of the Albert Memorial. Back in the centre, and I visit the EU quarter; a strange mix of skyscrapers and gleaming offices with the smallscale. I walk down one such road, past the Natural History Museum with the model Iguanodon outside, to the Wierz museum. Wierz can perhaps be best described as the acme of the nineteenth century video nasty; a range of paintings showing various grisly subjects. In one painting, a man is seen blowing his own brains out, in other a man opens his own coffin after a premature burial. In another a naked woman stands opposite a skeleton. Painting in a Rubenesque style, a lot of his better paintings rather recall Blake to my mind, but it can still be rather strange to see sentimental genre paintings immediately adjacent to pictures of Satan. Details of tromple l’oeil doors, dogs and keys on the walls to give it a certain vein of Magrittesque whimsy though.

My reactions to Inception were somewhat ambivalent. Like The Matrix, Existenz and Avatar it is premised on the idea of unreality, dreams in this case, as something seductive and addictive. Nonetheless, there’s something rather banal and mechanistic about the dreams in the film. Whereas Ariadne’s introduction to the dreams has her distorting and deranging the fabric of the dream city around her, the dreams that are central to the plot are rather generic (literally so, with action films and gangster heist films apparently forming the basis of the dreams within dreams). The only departures from realism in those films are mechanically attributed to the difference in the perception of time and the position of the body between the dreams (the latter being rather unusual; one is surely least aware of the body when dreaming). The action of the dreams is quite sequential; it is in point of detail, simply not especially dreamlike. Compare to Paprika where the dream sequences are laden with giant dolls and circuses and the idea of dreamer’s building a rather dreary concrete city for fifty years seems decidedly drab. Both Paprika and Inception place a Freudian stress on resolving repressed emotions (survivor’s guilt or unacknowledged sexual attraction in the former, lack of parental love or guilt in the latter), but where Paprika’s characters are quirky and uniquely individual, Nolan’s characters suggest an interest in identity without an interest in character. His protagonists are shown introspecting but not living; in most other films Ariadne would have emerged as a love interest for Cobb, but not here. Nolan’s interest lies within the idea of a self that is increasingly mediated through virtual environments and are accordingly increasingly at risk of editing, masking and hacking; the internet and video games are more pertinent metaphors for the narrative than the dreams Nolan actually uses.

Tragedy is subversive, comedy is conformist. Where comedy incites us to laugh at the odd and unusual, tragedy elevates and dignifies it. Compare the ignoble fate meted out to Hotspur to the apotheosis of Antony and Cleopatra. Of course, in practice it would be supremely easy to invert my opening sentence and to create a case that tragedy marginalises the outside while comedy subserts the status quo, but it was still something going through my mind while watching a performance of Wagner’s Mastersingers of Nuremberg. Where the Ring Cycle or Tristan and Isolde depict passion as a chaotic force that destroys all in its wake, the Mastersingers is all about how it can be contained. Sachs even dwells on the possibility of events proceeding in the same direction as they did for Tristan, before Walther and Eva’s love leads them instead to marriage. Where Wagner’s other operas are generally aristocratic, Walther abandons that background in favour of Nuremberg’s burghers. The emphasis placed in the opera on art as a romantic expression of the national gesellschaft, something instinctive rather than a product of artifice shows Wagner at his most complex. On the one hand, his stress on folk art rather than elite culture (and the elevation of a cobbler to the status of protagonist) reflects his leftist politics. On the other, it forges a path towards Hitler’s admiration for Wagner and national socialism, with the depiction of Beckmesser, so reminiscent of Shakespeare in As You Like It, having some marked parallels with Wagner’s antisemitism, the dark side of his vision of a pre-capitalist Germany. The Prom immediately after the Mastersingers contains Rachmaninov’s 2nd piano concerto and Tchaikovsky’s Manfred Symphony, while a few weeks later the Mastersingers were back again; the overture being played in Lemare’s organ arrangement along with Tannhäuser and the Ride of the Valkyries.

The British Library’s maps exhibition turns out to be more interesting than I’d imagined, showing a combination of maps, globes, folded screens and posters. Much of the history of maps is as much about history or architecture as geography, as with a map of Europe that doubled as a visual record of the siege of Vienna or the many maps showing representations of the city’s buildings around their edges (such as the enormous Klencke altas, open here with views of the Low Counties). An elevated view of Seville from south of the Guadalquivir river shares its perspective and broad details with a view of London showing St Paul’s at the centre. In passing, I find myself wondering why this sort of perspective faded from view in the nineteenth century; presumably as cities grew larger a perspective equivalent to that obtainable from the naked eye became redundant. Inevitably maps also include views of the population, flora and fauna; a view of christian Europe include an appearance by Durer’s rhino in North Africa (inaccurately so as Durer had shown an Indian rhinoceros). The pre-Copernican worldview of the various Mappa Mundi designs in display shows geography and religion as co-terminous, with the earth as the body of the lord and Jerusalem as its omphalos. Grayson Perry’s Map of Nowhere presents a somewhat cynical post-religious revival of this tradition. Similarly, Stephen Walters shows London as an island, detached from the rest of Britain, although Booth’s poverty map or Gill’s Wunderground map are both absent. Maps of London abound but there’s no Harry Beck tube map or Great Bear pastiche. One other omission is foreign perspective; a Chinese artist paints a view of Guangzhiu harbour, but uses European rather than axonometric perspectives.

Some of the satirical maps are particularly. A pair of Victorian election maps show Gladstone and Disraeli astride the British Isles. Each map is for a different side in spite of both having been created by the same artist. Soviet maps castigate churches and synagogues for their wealth at a time of famine in Ukraine. A teatrade map seem to suggest that most of the world revolves around tea: “Saharah desert: no water to make tea.”

I’ve often thought that much of the tone and themes of Russian nineteenth century fiction lends itself well to the modern world. The hapless clerks in Gogol and Dostoevsky exist in a world where the bureaucracy deprives them of autonomy (as it could be said to with today’s ‘flexible’ markets), leading to a narrative form distanced from Western European realism and more deeply versed in the absurd. In the fiction of Daniil Kharms as much as in Kafka, the absurd emerges as a response to totalitarianism. At times, the absurdism is composed of a deliberate break from the quotidian into the fantastic. Often, that break is a form of violence (usually directed at little old ladies and children), something that hardly accorded with Soviet ideas of ostranenie of the kind the Oberiu declaration had endorsed ("look at an object with bare eyes and you will for the first time see it cleansed of its crumbling literary gilding . . . To cleanse the object of the rubbish of ancient, decayed cultures – is this not the real requirement of our times?"). At others, it lies in a bathetic collapse of the narrative, with nothing of any note happening. In one form reality is subverted, in another the literary form is subverted.

Cather’s The Professor’s House is an interesting case of the fable or romance elements of the American novel overlapping with the more social aspects of the European novel. In some respects, it’s a fable about the Professor regaining his earlier self; "The Kansas boy who had come back to St Peter this summer was not a scholar. He was a primitive. He was only interested in earth and woods and water." Conversely though, its polyphonic depictions of the two extremes represented by Tom and by Louie, of nature and civilisation is highly nuanced. One of the things that surprises me about The Divine Comedy is how theologically heterodox it must have seemed. Much of its vision is classical rather than christian, from the idea of an outer circle in hell for virtuous pagans to the presence of Cerberus and Charon. Equally, the repeated condemnations of church corruption buttressed by an emphasis on faith seems like an anticipation of Savonarola.

The heat of the summer is impossible to escape at present. After several years of overcast and indifferent summers, crickets are chirping amidst burnt out grass. The church of St Mary in Buscot is notable for a few things. Firstly, it’s nowhere near the village and is surrounded by fields and woodland. Secondly, the churchyard is replete with baroque monuments, from lichen encrusted putti to distended skulls. Finally, there’s the Norman arches and Burne Jones window inside, a St Christopher surrounded by similar designs that prove to date from after the great war. Nearby All Saints Faringdon is less noticeable; the church is a rather squat structure, enlivened mostly by some extraordinary baroque sculptures. Beyond lies Circencester with its exorbitant parish church and its fan vaults, Saxon crucifixes and ornate Garstang marriage chest. Finally, I arrive in Chedworth and its Roman villa. The Corinium mosaics still retain much of their colour, like the hooded figure of winter while the Victorian museum has a display of Samian ware and altars showing carved figures. Outside, a spring still bubbles where water gods would have been worshipped. Nearby, orchids bloom in the grass.

The first thing that strikes me about Blenheim Palace are the eyes painted on the ceiling above the main doors.Inside, one passes through to the Great Hall and Thornhill’s ceiling. Inevitably, it rather reminds me of Chatsworth (unsurprisingly, given Laguerre’s ceiling painting in the saloon), although there is rather less interest in matters artistic or antiquarian here, in spite of Epstein busts and sculptures of Alexander and Hadrian. Most of the paintings are by Sargent, Romney and Reynolds; all well and good but not enormously exciting. A selection of Churchill’s paintings were also on display. While certainly proficient, I can’t say they were especially striking, as nice as it might be to have an artistic Prime Minister now. The porcelain collection is rather better, ranging from Kakiemon to Meissen. Tapestries woven to commemorate Marlborough’s victory at Blindheim line many of the walls, still retaining much of their colour.Most impressive is Hawksmoor’s long library with its Rysbrack statue of Queen Anne and large organ dominating one end of the gallery. The grounds include a number of formal gardens, reconstructed from Capability Brown’s vandalism and featuring a range of neo-classical statues, such as a coade stone replica of The Dying Gaul, as well as some bizarre Greek Sphinxes with their faces modelled on one of the Duchesses. A black and white cat happily rolls around in the dust as it enjoys the sunlight. For all my dislike of Brown, the landscape is nonetheless remarkable with the lakes and islands interrupted by Vanbrugh’s bridge. Finally, I walk out to the victory column, past the young lambs.

The following weekend is given up to visiting Hughenden and West Wycombe. I;m amazed at West Wycombe at how clear the water in the streams and lakes is; fish lazily glide by (a little too lazily given the heron I also notice), while families of swans and ducks swim above, cygnets and ducklings in tow. Hughenden has a new exhibition in the cellars on the house’s role during the second world war in mapmaking.

Surrealism is always a difficult concept to define. Is it simply an art movement that flourished in the wake of Freud’s theories or a universal principle in the the human pysche that includes Lewis Carroll and Lear as much as Breton and Ernst. The Barbican’s surrealist house gives few answers on this score, preferring to construct itself as a wunderkammer. It begins with Buster Keaton’s Steamboat Bill, Jr. set alongside Duschamp’s The Fresh Widow and Please Touch. Some objects, such as Freud’s consulting room chair, are here by virtue of association only. On the one hand, paintings by Tanguy, Magritte’s Lovers and Homage to Mack Sennett, Man Ray’s photos of Gaudi’s buildings and Table Surrealiste by Giascommetti are set alongside Hopper’s House by the Railroad, Tarkovsky’s Sacrifice, Svankmajer’s Jabberwock and Louise Bourgeois’s Femme Maison. Dali’s Sleep, with its sleeping head supported on struts is paralleled to Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, shown here through a set photos showing its ruined state as well as a more obviously painting of a zebra on its roof. Corbusier’s Beistegui apartments prove more genuinely surrealist, with the fireplace on their roof garden. Of the modern works, Rebecca Horn’s Concert for Anarchy seems closest to the spirit of the original surrealist movement, a piano hung from the ceiling where the keys and lid periodically explode open.

Reading Iain Sinclar’s London Orbital proves to be a less than scintillating experience. Ballard is repeatedly invoked as a figure, but whereas Ballard’s modernism was ambivalently positioned between rapture and resistance, Sinclar’s posture is rather more predictable. In essence, Sinclair is an advocate of outsider or vernacular architecture. Victorian asylums are worthy of being lauded while the likes of Painswick Park on the one hand or Bluewater on the other are to be condemned.

East London tends to remind me of Marc Auge’s concept of non-places. Silvertown serves as a classic example; the most prominent buildings are an airport, a hotel and a conference centre, all of them designed for transitory encounters rather than building any sense of place. The same sense of transience comes from the general emptiness of the place, which is as lacking in people as the city at this time. CCTV and private property notices abound. What housing exists here is of a bizarrely suburban ‘Barratt’ home style, which contrasts oddly with the derelict mill nearby. Perhaps the oddest aspect to the place is just the emptiness of it; the vastness of the docks is very impressive (although it might have been more impressive with any ships therein) but after the cramped and crowded nature of central London, the east of the city often seems to consists of ad hoc factories, motorways, blandly landscaped parks, deserted scrubland and derelict factories. From Silvertown, the most noticeable thing that can be seen are the towers of Canary Wharf and the Gherkin as planes fly overhead. The most beautiful thing here are the extraordinary Stothert and Pitt cranes, in perfect preservation but unused and only retained as a form of heritage. As a result, they look like some sort of alien incursion, John Christopher’s tripods preserved in aspic. A walk nearby takes me to the Thames Flood Barrier; something which seems as out of place as the cranes, albeit due to its futurism rather than its heritage. Further eastwards, and one is greeted with the sight of a tatty market as one exist Woolwich tube station, quickly setting the tone of a down at heel Greenwich. Walking around the former Royal Arsenal, it’s interesting to note that yesterday’s military camps apparently make for today’s desirable properties. The fact that all the communities here are gated only serves to reinforce the appropriateness of the military connections. A forlorn looking statue of Wellington stands over a scrubby park near the erstwhile Shell Foundry, firmly pointing away from Woolwich.

Henry Moore is one of those artists that it’s easy to be familiar with while knowing very little about him. His sculptures are both endemic and rather anonymous; along the road from the Tate Gallery where a Moore exhibition is currently being held, are two Moore sculptures, Knife Edge and Looking Piece. The previous weekend, I had stumbled across Falling Warrior in Cambridge. I’ve always preferred Barabara Hepworth’s work, where there’s something rather more suggestive about the way she combines geometrical designs with natural forms. Moore’s work, by contrast, often feels rather formless, as if the abstraction were simply an excuse for a lack of content.

The Tate’s exhibition begins by showing his earlier work that rather reminds me of Epstein, Gill or Gaudier-Brzeska in its preoccupation with the influence of African or South American cultures. Moore observed that African sculpture was dominated by ‘sex and religion,’ and much of the work here is dominated by mother and child figures, part fertility figure, part Madonna. Some of these suggest a tenderness to the relationship, others seem to suggest something trapped by a monster. For all of Moore’s pre-occupation with the theme, there’s little sense of it meaning a great deal, which is perhaps why the exhibition then traces Moore’s path to abstraction with a set of compositions in which figures dissolve into Daliesque patterns, like melted wax. Probably the most interesting aspect of Moore’s work is the Duchampesque idea of found art; much of these wooden or stone sculptures look like something eroded by the waves and cast out into the seashore. The material proves rather more important than the form in several respects. Similarly, his Hepworthesque stringed sculptures are at their most interesting when they echo organic forms; a white sculpture festooned with red string looks like nothing so much as a skeleton and decomposing ligature. What the exhibition brings out well is that Moore conceived his works as part of a landscape, with each sculpture originating as a drawing.

All of which is why when works like The Helmet are attributed to a context of the coming second world war, when the post-war work is attributed to the holocaust or when Moore himself created works around themes like atomic energy, it’s very difficult to see whether the parallel comes from. A postwar work like Falling Warrior echoes the classical tradition in that the figure is clearly holding a shield as it falls. But the undulating blobs that make up the figure are no different to those used in any other of his reclining forms, male or female. The abstraction is so absolute, there is no obvious sign of symbolism. Instead it simply looks as if Moore had succeeded in erasing the line between art and nature. The one exception to this are his drawings from the second world war, showing miners at work or people huddled in the London Underground. This is really the only point at which Moore’s stylistic vicissitudes came into line with the spirit of his age.

Before returning home, I walk to Trafalgar Square to see the current occupant of the fourth plinth: Yinka Shonibare’s Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle. Where Moore spoke of his work as having a mystery that only served to conceal vacuity, Shonibare heads towards the other extreme of literalism. Shonibare is the first black artist to be commissioned to make a work for the fourth plinth, creating a celebration multiculturalism society, which Shonibare attributes in part to Nelson’s victory at the Battle of Trafalgar: the seas were freed for the British to build their Empire; ushering in an age of globalisation that led to Britain itself becoming a home to many of its former colonial subjects. Shonibare represents this by using African fabrics for the sails, although the fabric is actually from Brixton market. The reason it is associated with African dress is not indigenous craftsmanship but the mass production of the material by the Dutch, who sold it to their West African colonies. The design, in fact, is not even African: it’s based on Indonesian batik. A cynic might suggest that while not without merit, this account of British colonial history is a rather unproblematic one that leaves out troubling trifles like the Indian Mutiny or the Mau Mau uprising. Still, it’s both unusual and rather captivating to look at, blowing up the traditional ship model, like an inverted model village.

Recently, I’ve been reading Gauguin’s Tahiti Journal. Unsurprisingly, much of this consists of opposed corrupt European civilisation with the Eden of Tahiti’s noble savages, but it’s interesting to note that Gaugui is far from consistent in this respect. Tahitian myths are described as a prototype for a theory of astronomy, while he frequently tends to look down on the natives, as when his wife wants to buy some worthless copper trinkets or when he ignores their superstitions.

The other book I’ve just finished is Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities. I’ve written various times before now on the difficulties of writing a social novel of a similar breed to that created by Dickens, Thackeray, Eliot or Balzac; a society increasingly lacking social homogeneity is likely to be increasingly inhospitable to that sort of project. It has to be said that Wolfe copes rather well, substituting racial tensions as the modern taboo instead of the Victorian obsession with sexuality. It’s also interesting to note that whereas the Victorian novel assumes character is stable, the product of a particular place and time, Wolfe assumes it to be as fluid as the society it inhabits; "there is no such thing as a private self.. western philosophers had viewed the self as something unique… at the core of one’s self there had to be something irreducible and inviolate… each person is a transitory composite of materials borrowed from the environment… your self is other people… I’m not Sherman McCoy anymore. I’m someone else with a proper name." In the Victorian novel, suffering ennobles and refines character. In Wolfe’s, McCoy becomes increasingly duplicitous, his self changing as he goes from stockbroker to professional defendant. Equally, in the Victorian novel, the two nations are to be demonstrated to be as part of a single indivisible whole. Wolfe has no such concerns and has no regard for the nobility of poverty or for philanthropy (Dicken’s Mrs Jellyby and Wolfe’s Reverend Bacon have quite a great deal in common).

The abbey at St Albans strikes me as rather odd, both for its rather distended, squat and narrow, proportions and for its placements. English cathedrals generally tend to nestle in pleasant greens in the middle of town, with the river nearby. St Albans is placed high up on a hill and looks rather more like St Vitus than Winchester or Tewskesbury. As a building, it’s an odd hotch-potch of styles, from the romanesque to the gothic, with an equally odd mixture of medieval paintings and Victorian sculptures. It’s especially strange seeing a shrine to a martyred saint in an English cathedral, complete with praying nuns. Afterwards, I have a walk around the remains of Verulamium, especially a Roman ampitheatre and a mosaic floor from a town house. It’s all rather reminiscent of Calleva, even down to the prominence of flint in the walls, although the mosaic is better preserved than anything there.

From Hertfordshire onwards to Cambridgeshire. In a lot of ways, Cambridgeshire reminds me of the Midlands. The Trent valley shares the flatness of the fens, although the landscape there is more shaped by industry and agriculture on an industrial scale. Inevitably, Cambridgeshire is rather more picturesque. I start off by visiting Ely. Easily the most unusual cathedral in England, the romanesque exterior is matched by an interior with Victorian ceiling frescos, George Gilbert Scott reredos and organ cases, and a gothic dome. Tudor tombs jostle for space with replica Rublev icons.

Within Cambridge itself, I have to admit that in many respects I prefer it to Oxford. Although many of the classical and baroque buildings, like Downing and Emmanuel, have a golden sandstone that would fit perfectly in Oxford, there’s also the redbrick Tudor and medieval gatehouses. I visit Jesus, with its gothic chapel and Paolozzi sculptures, the darkened ‘gloomth’ of Bodley’s All Saints with its Morris and Company window, St John’s with its turreted gatehouse and Eric Gill sculptures, Giles Gilbert Scott’s library with Gray’s new sculptures (easily the tallest building in Cambridge), Trinity with its Roubiliac and Thornycroft sculptures, Clare with its beautiful gardens and Hepworth sculptures. Walking into one of Giles Gilbert Scott’s new buildings with a Moore sculpture, I notice a rather large bracket fungus growing on the trunk of an especially large tree. After eating on the backs as dandelion snow drifted through air, I visit with Kings. It’s easily one of the most impressive buildings in England, although I’m left wondering if the splendour of the ceiling isn’t somewhat offset by the emptiness of the interior. Perhaps I prefer the clutter at places like Ely. Finally, I pass briefly into Selywn, where I’m in time to disturb the college cat from eviscerating a mouse.

There can’t be many exhibitions that combined the opportunity to see John Dee’s scrying glass (actually an Aztec obsidian mirror) with the porcelain bowl that gave rise to Gray’s Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes. The V&A currently have an exhibition on the Horace Walpole’s collection of art and antiquities from Strawberry Hill, such as medieval armour, Italian maiolica, Sevres china, a wooden cravat carved by Grinling Gibbons, Boulle furniture, Elizabethan miniatures, a French enamel horn, a clock given by Henry VIII to Anne Boleyn and, oddly enough, Cardinal Wolsey’s hat.. It’s definitely not the Victorian idea of gothic; Walpole seems to have had a particular passion for Reynolds. Presumably he was less fond of Rowlandson’s caricature of Strawberry Hill as a catholic monastery. Hogarth seemed the best painter on offer.

In the evening, I go to Oxford for a concert; Vivaldi and Piazzolla’s versions of the Four Seasons (occasionally interspersing passages from them both, rather reminding me of the snippets from God Save the Queen erupting in Red Priest’s version of the Four Seasons). Although based on the Theatre of Marcellus, the Sheldonian reminds me more of the Globe, in its semi-circular design (with some of the audience behind the players) and the trompe l’oeil effects on the pillars.

I‘m not generally the type for political protest. They demand a certain stridency and perhaps a certain blinkering in one’s mentality that I’m generally not comfortable with. It’s perhaps rather surprising then that I chose proportional representation as the issue that would lead me to my first protest. Not entirely unjustly regarded as a rather academic subject, I’ve nonetheless concluded that it lies at the root of most of our political problems. Current political policy gravitates around a relatively small number of voters in a small number of marginal constituencies. The result is a skewed political mainstream that still manages a rather pointless tribalist rivalry over the few remaining differences. In my own case, I’ve never lived in a constituency where my vote has made one jot of difference. I grew up in a Labour/Tory marginal where my Liberal Democrat vote did little to prevent the candidate from losing their deposit. I now live in a Tory safe seat, where the sitting MP has a majority larger than all of his opponents combined.

So, that’s why I found myself in the Old Palace Yard this weekend, at the Take Back Parliament rally. The attendees varied widely, from the customary social workers and hippies to various people who looked like they were taking time out from the WI or National Trust. The main common denomination was the colour purple, adopted from the suffragettes and emblazoned here in ribbons, placards, flags and headbands. The rally began with a speech by Evan Harris, beginning with the opening line "greetings fellow anoraks." He noted that the first priority was to demonstrate that the current coalition could lead to stable government, as well as the importance of not allowing a lack of enthusiasm for AV stop us from getting behind it as an important first step. I don’t think I’ve ever heard Evan Harris say anything that wasn’t well thought out and sensible and this speech made me realise how worse off British politics is for his absence. Visiting Oxford later, I saw that the gates to his erstwhile constituency office are covered in ribbons. George Monbiot also spoke very well, reflecting on the equal importance of addressing the issue of party funding – I particularly liked the account of a peeved Tory blogger complaining at being denied an overall majority after throwing Ashcroft’s millions at the campaigns. "The question of not getting value for Ashcroft’s money," Monbiot drily commented, "is not especially where the unfairness lies." Other speakers included some first time voters, former Battersea MP Mark Linton, a Green MEP representatives of Charter88, the Electoral Reform Society and Pam Giddy from Power2010. Diversion was briefly provided by the presence of a large red ‘First Past The Post dinosaur’ on the podium. The only speaker I didn’t greatly care for was Mark Thomas, whose partisan tone both jarred and grated. On the whole, I preferred the First Past The Post dinosaur. Finally, we wrapped our ribbons and flags around the railings of the Houses of Parliament: