All posts tagged: Gordon

The Revolutionary Gordon Wood

The Revolutionary Gordon Wood

Published by Sam Flores

The American Revolution was revolutionary. That’s the deceptively simple claim to which Gordon Wood, the historian who was tragically killed at the age of 92 on Sunday, devoted his career. The Revolution, of course, overthrew a monarchy—but the freedoms it advanced were unequally enjoyed, and the Founders left a great deal undone. But Wood insisted that, even so, we not lose sight of its fundamental character. “The revolution did more than legally create the United States; it transformed society,” Wood wrote in his 1991 book The Radicalism of the American Revolution, which won the Pulitzer Prize for History. “Americans,” he argued, “had become, almost overnight, the most liberal, the most democratic, the most commercially minded, and the most modern people in the world.” By 2011, in The Idea of America, he had expanded his claim: The Revolution “was an event that opened up a new era in politics and society, not just for Americans but eventually for everyone in the world.” Wood’s vision of the Revolution gives us much to celebrate in 2026. Wood became …

Being Gordon Ramsay review – Sanitised propaganda that could have been so much more interesting

Being Gordon Ramsay review – Sanitised propaganda that could have been so much more interesting

Published by Daniella Wilson

During the Covid-19 lockdowns in 2020 and 2021 – while most people were nurturing sourdough starters like they were human babies – I developed an unhealthy obsession with Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. From the faces he’d pull during the kitchen inspection to the inevitable disgust at that first bite of food, Gordon Ramsay’s inimitably charismatic screen presence bore me through the period. Now he’s back, with glossy Netflix series Being Gordon Ramsay, and turning the camera on his own project, a multirestaurant development at the top of a new London skyscraper. “It’s a huge undertaking,” Tana, Gordon’s patient wife, tells her husband, as they relax on the sofa. “Really, the biggest thing you’ve done to date.” And Ramsay’s plan is ambitious. He’s taken a 20-year lease on a vast space at the top of 22 Bishopsgate, in which he intends to open four different projects. There’s Gordon Ramsay High, a spin-off of his Michelin-starred fine dining establishment on the Royal Hospital Road; Lucky Cat, leaping over from Mayfair; a branch of his Bread Street Kitchen chain; …

Not for Sale | Gordon F. Sander

Not for Sale | Gordon F. Sander

Published by Jenni Sidey

“When you have seen the great elevated pure nature of Greenlandic nature you feel closer to the Creator and [understand] the pettiness of civilized life,” the Danish artist J.E.C. Rasmussen wrote to his fiancée after he returned from his first, life-changing expedition to the Arctic Danish colony in 1872. I got an idea of what Rasmussen meant last May in Nuuk, Greenland’s capital, as I stood on Hans Egedesvej, the street named after the Danish-Norwegian missionary who founded the colony in 1721. Nuuk was in the midst of a “late winter” blizzard, as the locals call it. The transcendent scene, complete with shimmering, ice-covered mountains, reminded me of the photorealistic Greenland landscapes of Rasmussen, who perished after he jumped—or fell—from the deck of a Danish naval brig during his return from his second expedition to the Arctic territory in 1893. Suddenly out of the snow-driven mist appeared a warship moving swiftly, at perhaps twenty knots, before it disappeared. For a moment I thought it might be American. “No, it’s one of ours,” the desk person …