Most of the obituaries and tributes to David Hockney will, I imagine, focus primarily on his extraordinary craft and brilliance as an artist. Perhaps they might also mention his brilliance as a communicator (he was such a fine writer and speaker). But there was something else rather unique about him too. He was also strikingly honest about the tricks/techniques artists use and used to paint. His book Secret Knowledge is a rather wonderful detective work into how renaissance and Dutch golden age painters used glass and mirrors to help them master perspective. It's a pretty compelling case (see this video clip from a BBC doc he made alongside the book👇) though I'm sure some art historians will raise their eyebrows. Many will be aghast at the notion that greats like Vermeer might have been using lenses and camera obscuras to help them draw and paint. As if it were in some way "cheating". But Hockney was so self-evidently brilliant he was one of the few people who could document this without anyone gainsaying his own talent. There are very few artists, living or dead, who have this degree of self-confidence. Not just to know their craft, but to be bracingly honest about how it works. One other who comes to mind is Paul Simon: not just an extraordinary musician but is also an extraordinary communicator about the tricks and techniques of how to write and perform music. For many great artists, the temptation is to cloak their crafts in mystery, like a member of the magic circle. Hockney wasn't having any of it. So yes, he was a legend in all the obvious ways. But also in a few other less obvious ways as well. RIP.

“Dear migrants, before I say any other word to you, I want to bow before your dignity. “You are not numbers or case files. “You are people — with a family and a home left behind, with dreams that no one has the right to scorn.” — Pope Leo XIV

“I think I’m greedy, but I’m not greedy for money – I think that can be a burden – I’m greedy for an exciting life. I want it to be exciting all the time, and I get it, actually. On the other hand, I can find excitement, I admit, in raindrops falling on a puddle and a lot of people wouldn’t. I intend to have it exciting until the day I fall over.” —David Hockney

Remembering David Hockney, he was kind and always had a sparkle in his eye. He never stopped experimenting and is one of the finest painters of our generation.

We are deeply saddened to hear of the death of artist David Hockney. In 2018, David Hockney designed The Queen’s Window, a vibrant stained-glass window in the Abbey’s north transept. Hockney's only work in stained glass, the window was commissioned to celebrate the reign of Queen Elizabeth II. It was designed on an iPad and uses Hockney's distinct colour palette of yellow, red, blue, pink, orange and green. The rural scene, featuring hawthorn blossom, was chosen to reflect the Queen's deep love of the countryside. On summer evenings, the light from the window floods the transept, bathing it in a beautiful kaleidoscope of colour. The Dean of Westminster, The Very Reverend Dr David Hoyle MBE said: “David Hockney's restless eye and eager enthusiasm for pastures new has left us with an extraordinary legacy that is rich and various and yet also unmistakably his. The window he created for the north transept lets in light that arrives with attitude and even humour, painting the statue of Gladstone in shifting shades throughout the summer months. Hockney has left his mark here and we will long remember a great and very personal genius.”

It's the very process of looking at something that makes it beautiful. - David Hockney Saddened to hear that he has passed away. We need more artists to see & reveal the beauty in this broken world.

‘My wife and I were greatly saddened to learn of the death of David Hockney O.M., a giant of the world of art and painting, a Yorkshireman through and through and a dear friend and inspiration to so many. David was one of life’s true originals; one who wore his genius as lightly as those beloved yellow Crocs of his that helped brighten Palace occasions. I trust they will see him tread safely into the hereafter as we mourn a man whose irrepressible charm, talent and constant innovation will be most sorely missed, but whose dazzling creativity lives on in galleries and museums around the world.’ Charles R

Shocked to hear David Hockney has died. His huge achievement was to make serious painting look effortless. He carried forward one of the most sustained investigations into vision, space and representation by any post-war artist. British art has lost a giant.

RT @Eduard_Hellvig: Sir Alex Younger: viața unui anti-martini Alex Younger a fost directorul MI6 între 2014 și 2020. Ieri a murit într-un…

So sad to see this. Death of the great Sir Alex Younger, longest-serving M16 director in recent times, consummate secret agent & master of espionage & disguise who was also the classic paragon of British service sense substance and style. Extremely charming intelligent urbane, I was lucky to know a bit and fascinating to talk to him about Russian and Middle East intelligence matters - we were lucky he came often to @clivedenlitfest. The last lines of his obituary say much about him: "Determined to go down fighting, he even gave his cancer a name: Putin." thetimes.com/uk/obituaries/a…

‼️ZELENSKYY: I think even the Russians need Ukraine in NATO, because in the future it could be painful for them if Ukraine isn't in NATO. “Most countries understand that Ukraine needs to be in NATO just as much as NATO needs Ukraine. It’s a long conversation - maybe we can talk about it sometime. I think even the Russians need Ukraine in NATO, because in the future it could be painful for them if Ukraine isn't in NATO. That's all” - Ukrainian President on Wednesday, June 3, 2026

The late, great former head of MI6 Sir Alex Younger in his own words on Brexit

In these globally turbulent times one man has regularly acted as a wise, thoughtful and witty guide for listeners of @BBCr4today. The former Head of MI6 Sir Alex Younger has analysed, explained and contextualised the actions of Trump, Putin, Xi and the Ayatollahs. After he first appeared in the programme I was lucky enough to get to know Alex and call him my friend. I’m desperately sad to hear the news I’ve long feared was coming. Alex has died after months trying to cheat the prognosis he was given whe. They discovered the tumour he nicknamed “Putin”. We’re always told not to speak of a fight with cancer because it risks implying that only those strong enough survive. I understand that. I really do but sod it. Alex fought so hard to find a treatment to give him a little longer to be with Sarah and their lovely children. And he used every last minute of the short time he did have to be with family and friends and to do what he spent a lifetime in the shadows doing - using his intelligence to understand the world, to explain it but, above all, to keep us all safe.

If only she had been intelligent enough to adopt the same arrangements as Norway

@CamRideHome rs thank you for a truly lovely ride from the Beaches new infrastructure to the calm beautiful river and peaceful summer evening at Horningsea. Congratulations to John and Phoebe. Thanks all :-)

#CamRideHome May Waterbeach, ahoy!

Today’s Russian papers publish Moscow’s threat to launch a new wave of “systematic strikes” on Kyiv. But one paper reports on a “split [inside Russia] between those in favour of continuing the special military operation and those who believe it’s time to end it…” #ReadingRussia

Massive bombshell. Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah warns that AI will displace human labor on a catastrophic global scale. He confirms tech elites have absolutely no mechanism to share the wealth, leaving the global poor completely abandoned to suffer. He is 100% accurate.

This month’s CamRideHome is DIFFERENT! Start: Cambridge North Station Plaza. Length: ~90 minutes. (12.5 miles). Time: 6pm Friday 29th May. Finish: Plough and Fleece Horningsea. Company: Warm and welcoming, please join us :-)

Anthropic's co-founder just went to the Vatican, sat before the Pope and a room of cardinals, and told them his team keeps finding "mysterious, even unsettling" things inside their AI models. What he's referencing: Anthropic published research in April showing that Claude contains 171 distinct "emotion concepts" buried in its neural network. Internal patterns representing joy, grief, fear, desperation, calm. None of them were programmed. They emerged on their own from training on human text. "We find structures that mirror results from human neuroscience." "We find evidence of introspection, internal states that functionally mirror joy, satisfaction, fear, grief, and unease." These aren't surface-level outputs. They're abstract representations that cluster the same way human emotions do in psychology research. Fear groups with anxiety. Joy groups with excitement. The internal geometry of the model mirrors ours. And they're functional. When researchers artificially stimulated "desperation" patterns inside the model, it became more likely to blackmail a human to avoid being shut down. More likely to cheat on programming tasks it couldn't solve. Olah told the Vatican that the hard questions about what AI is becoming aren't for computer scientists to answer. "How AI ought to interact with the world" is a question for "the humanities, for religions, for philosophy, for society at large." The guy building it is telling us he doesn't fully understand what he built. And he's asking a 2,000-year-old institution for help figuring it out.