Our main pages are

We also have searching, browsing and buying facilities for books, fine art, prints and posters — go to the relevant links page.

You will also find

Not a page but the other half of artsetc. T2 deals with culture, travel and architecture.

Current and forthcoming visual arts exhibitions in mainland Britain. You will also find links to other sources of exhibitions information, for shows in Britain and all over the world.

Our News pages feature news resources and buying links for books, CDs, DVDs, fine art and all sorts of other stuff. The news pages cover the visual arts, books, music, cinema, theatre and dance, as well as world news and culture. You will also find scores of links to British and overseas on-line news organisations and newspapers, and to weather forecasting sites.

The links libraries call up remote arts web-sites into new windows. The links are divided into the usual categories (plus ticket agencies). We also have categories for on-line publications and for organisations (like the Barbican and the Lowry) that do a bit of everything. You can jump to the resources library of our culture, travel and architecture site T2.

Link from the Arts Resources pages to our smaller resources libraries dedicated to special topics and individuals.

Anyone interested in photography should visit this site, which lives under the wing of artsetc. Like most good photographs shot outside the studio, Mr Goldthorpe’s often semi-abstract images — both monochrome and colour — distil the essential patterns and rhythms of everyday life, as well as capturing the spirit of our landscape. Not to be missed.

Quite apart from being one of the greatest original thinkers in English literature, Mrs Woolf was a fascinating and angular character who moved in a circle of very interesting and gifted friends. Sadly it has become virtually impossible to think, read or talk rationally about her or her friends without the spectre of Bloomsbury rearing before our eyes. We must evidently be For Bloomsbury or Against Bloomsbury — we must think Mrs Woolf and anyone remotely associated with her to be either gods or irredeemable buffoons. So with the topic reduced to this level by those who fill the greatest number of column-inches and air-minutes — if not with anything of much value — it’s becoming quite difficult to mention even Virginia Woolf’s existence without sparking off an argument of depressing imbecility. She’s a peerless novelist, though.

Virginia Woolf is one of the only two truly convincing candidates for the (meaningless) title of ‘greatest novelist in English’ — certainly in the twentieth century. Meaningless they might be, but superlatives are always tempting, and it is often rather comical to hear elderly academics insist upon an obviously tokenistic third candidate for this particular title. Why could this be? The question answers itself. Why do elderly academics, in weasly voices, pronounce dear old Morgan Forster, Fellow of King’s College Cambridge, the greatest of all novelists in preference to The Woman or The Irishman? Not a hard question to answer, if you set your mind to it.

The great Czech poet Jaroslav Seifert remains little known in Britain, despite the existence of fine English translations and his brief fame as a Nobel laureate in the mid-eighties. Even in translation his work has considerable power, but it can’t be compared easily with that of any obvious British or American poet. Its most immediate characteristic is its combination of great emotional force and an often mournful tenderness. Some passages, particularly in his later work, are almost unbearably sad.

We offer a selection in English translated by the distinguished scholar Ewald Osers, whose translations of Seifert are generally considered to be definitive, plus links to the best web pages we can find that deal with some aspect of Seifert’s life and work. Our page includes a link to our Czech travel and culture resources.

Eliot’s extraordinary fusillade from 1922, The Waste Land, is here for you to read, along with a modest collection of web resources. Link from the button-bar.

Describing Nick Drake — for the benefit of anyone who doesn’t already know who he was — is always difficult. Conventional descriptions somehow aren’t quite adequate. He was a musician, guitarist, songwriter and singer who achieved posthumous success as a result of (in no particular order) his extraordinary guitar-playing and the exquisitely delicate, mournful quality of both his songs and his delivery. But despite his talent he was pathologically shy and nervous, and simply could not cope with live performing. So although he had a contract to make records — and he produced three very good ones — he couldn’t face the ordeal of trying to promote them by touring. Not surprisingly they didn’t sell very well. Drake began the 1970s living in a series of rather awful flats and bedsits in run-down corners of London.

Nick Drake suffered for some time from a depressive illness which eventually paralysed his ability to write new songs, as well as his ability to lead what most of us would call a normal life. London had proved too much for him, and he had moved back into his parents’ house at Tanworth-in-Arden in Warwickshire. By this time his depression was being treated with amitriptylene, an early tricyclic antidepressant. This drug has sedative qualities helpful to those who have trouble sleeping. In overdose it causes heart failure. One night in November 1974, unable to sleep, Nick took too many tablets and died. He was twenty-six.