Harry Pearson

Britain's Agricultural Shows

A look at the Bumblebee: it's behaviour, characteristics, history and place in British culture.

The history and uses of weathervanes

The locomotive roared through European art for more than a century, inspiring English Romantics, French Impressionists, Italian Futurists and Belgian Surrealists. Harry Pearson tracks its epic journey
In the autumn of 1825, a wheezing, panting, cast-iron contraption designed by George and Robert Stephenson chugged out of the County Durham town of Shildon in the north of England. Named Locomotion No 1, the steam engine was hauling 20 coal wagons and an experimental passenger coach containing c...

Controverisal Italian artists Piero Manzoni made many of his best known works in a shirt factory in rural Denmark.

The mole: It's habits, history and place in British culture.

Bicycle Racing and Modern Art

Oman is a country of great variety. In fact, historically, it's a variety of countries. It was called 'Muscat and Oman' until the accession of Sultan Qaboos bin Said in 1970, and even that double barrel was a wishful attempt to impose homogeneity on a collection of mutually hostile indigenous tribes and a multitude of incomers: merchants from Persia and the Indian subcontinent; descendants of slaves from Somalia (when James Morris visited Oman in 1955 the Sultan, Qaboos's father, still kept a...

Travelling through Alaska in March.

As a new exhibition opens in Paris on the enigmatic figure who discovered Seurat, championed Pissarro, and was accused of murdering the French president, Harry Pearson examines the influence of the greatest tastemaker of his generation
Félix Fénéon, the most quietly influential figure on the art scene of fin-de-siècle Paris, cut an oddly comical figure. The discoverer of Georges Seurat, supporter of Maximilien Luce, and champion of Camille Pissarro aspired to an elegant dandyism that his unga...

In a newsagents on Gran Canaria last year, I did what any sensible person would do when faced with a choice between a two-day-old copy of the Daily Mail and yesterday’s Daily Mail – I bought Marca.
I speak no Spanish, but I recalled the Madrid sports daily fondly from the years when a friend of mine was working in Andalusia and we went to the Estadio Ramón Sánchez Pizjuán to see Ted McMinn scuttling around for Jock Wallace’s Sevilla – an admittedly bizarre fusion of ingredients that calls to ...

A walk through an area once populated by murderous clans leading to a cosy pub in rural Northumberland

The Esk Valley line transports pilgrims to a Yorkshire town made famous by its crop of giant gooseberries

The romance and history of England's cobbled streets