I don't know how I have passed my life without seeing the Topolski Century. This masterpiece-dazzling, if farouche-occupies a couple of railway arches near Waterloo Station. Having now visited it, images keep recurring to my mind. Not so much a conventional painting as a series of decorated spaces, the Century is Feliks Topolski's (1907-89) witness to the world as he encountered it.
He was never without a sketchbook, and could seize a moment with lightning speed. It is from his reams of sketches that the Century, begun in 1975, is made. Topolski went everywhere, knew everyone.
A Pole, he came to London to record George V's silver jubilee in 1935. As a war artist during the Second World War, he was sent to every front, and was one of the first people into Belsen concentration camp. A friend of George Bernard Shaw, he was commissioned to record the great figures of the day-Ghandi, Evelyn Waugh, the Pope and would seek out interesting folk, from hippies to the Black Panthers.
In Egypt, he shared a mistress with King Farouk. The scope is astonishing, the educative potential huge. Alas, the existence of the Century is now threatened by developments by Network Rail. For shame.
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Nature and nurture in the gardens of Bramham ParkTim Richardson looks at the innovative and superbly maintained 18th-century landscape garden of Bramham Park in West Yorkshire, home of Nick and Rachel Lane Fox. Photographs by Paul Highnam.
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If the future of Ferrari is electric vehicles, then it is our future tooIt's widely believed that Ferrari will unveil its first electric car this year. It's the signal that the internal combustion era is coming to an end.
