To Vienna, to hear some music, but above all to see one of the greatest art rooms in the world: the wondrous Pieter Bruegel room at the Kunsthistorisches Museum. It’s interesting that, at the heart of the collections of the imperial Habsburgs – with this in Vienna and the Goya Black Paintings in Madrid – you find such radically democratic, anti-court art, cocking its considerable snook at the elite painting tradition vapouring around it.
Bruegel painted the real early-modern Europe, with its biting cold, galumphing festivals, casually barbaric slaughters, children’s games, toiling farm workers, brawlers, drunks and thieves. His people are ordinary, squeezed between poverty and death, yet dancing, feasting and loving as long as they can.
Something went badly wrong after Bruegel. The huge, overblown canvases of Rubens in the nearby room seem almost to billow in embarrassment. Painting became far too grand, intimidating canvas propaganda for bishops and princes. All the bravura and ambition of the great Counter-Reformation artists, their psychological realism and plundering of classical and biblical myth, can’t hide the emptiness that Bruegel fills. A protest artist against cruelty, his paintings were made for his ordinary equals in seething Antwerp.
From ruin to riches
Vienna isn’t seething. She had her artistic and intellectual ferment long ago, but this is still one of the greatest of European cities – though elbowed aside now by Paris and Berlin. Vienna is the most bourgeois of the three: a place of creamy streets and gold cupolas, grand cafés and museums unrecognisable from the “smashed, dreary city… of undignified ruins” described by Graham Greene in his postwar The Third Man.
The most enjoyable account of Vienna in her early-20th-century heyday is Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday, in which he portrays the ageing, complacent, deeply cultural imperial city in its final years of glory. But there is a great warning in the book. Zweig says the years before the First World War were a time of material advance and popular optimism – “In those ten years, there was more freedom, informality and lack of inhibition than there had been in the entire preceding century. For the world was moving to a different rhythm.” He makes Europe then seem remarkably like Europe today, heedless of the disaster approaching.
In trying to settle in to my new role as editor-at-large, I plan to buy baggy, stained waistcoats and cultivate a watery, middle-distance stare. I envisaged spending a lot of time lounging in Viennese cafés. The trouble is, I no longer drink alcohol (18 months now) or smoke, which rather spoils the image. My new vice is cake, however, and Vienna is famously cake-obsessed. I don’t know about the mind, but for me, travel certainly broadens the arse.
The artful dodger
I had the good fortune to see David Hockney in fine form, though wheelchair-bound, in his studio, preparing for a new show in London. He has the most extraordinary mind – pin-sharp, constantly whirring. He seemed to remember everything, singing at one point an aria from The Rake’s Progress, his first great opera commission, and discussing reverse perspective and the Russian philosopher Pavel Florensky. His best story was about going to visit the filmmaker Jean Renoir in California and giving him the news that Picasso had just died. Renoir replied: “Oh. What a very un-Picasso thing to do.” As we arrived back in London, the air was crackling with fireworks. When I was young, fireworks were never used for Halloween and only briefly on Bonfire Night. But the former has become a sugary orgy, with gangs of children in skull masks hammering on doors and demanding tribute. How to respond? An acquaintance in north London now buys boxes of Ferrero Rocher, carefully unwraps each one, replaces it with a Brussels sprout, and reattaches the foil.
The blame game
We have now entered the part of the political cycle in which the Prime Minister is personally blamed for everything – including the cock-up by the Home Office in releasing Hadush Kebatu, the sex offender who was meant to be deported. I, meanwhile, seem to have got into an unwinnable fight with Larry, the Downing Street cat, who tweets to me: “You’ve made a mortal enemy,” after a podcast I recently appeared on. I have been waiting to get the Downing Street response to my despairing final piece as political editor. All I have had so far from a senior Starmer source is a reference to the Larry story, with the words: “Thank you for having the bravery to speak out on this.”
Being editor-at-large is not as glamorous as it may seem. Bedbugs have arrived in Primrose Hill. It’s Keir Starmer’s fault, and I’m writing to tell him so.
[Further reading: Tupac Shakur: lion or loser?]
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This article appears in the 20 Nov 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Meet the bond vigilantes