A new exhibition confirms Sir Anthony Caro as Britain’s greatest living
sculptor writes Gerald Isaaman

Wheel full circle. Anthony Caro will no doubt dismiss such a view of the major retrospective – and respected – exhibition of his work now on show at Tate Britain, to mark, appropriately, his 80th birthday year.
He is, after all, Britain’s most celebrated sculptor, a cherubic-faced man of enormous energy and intellect who changed the face of sculpture in this country. The artist, they claim, who took sculpture off its traditional pedestal.
Not true in fact, Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore, for whom Caro worked as an assistant, did that long before him, avant garde Americans too. And he, almost inevitably, followed in Moore’s footsteps, bravely creating large lumpen figures of life that distorted yet enhanced the physical energy of the human form.

The tenth anniversary of the comedian Peter Cook’s death late last year saw tributes broadcast on TV and radio, all attempting to capture the elusive quality that made him such a unique talent.
Documentaries and dramatisations of the great man’s life, even repeat showings of his own performances, served mainly to illustrate that the nature of Cook’s genius was unknowable.
Just opened at Hampstead’s New End Theatre, however is a new play that takes a different route into his complex psyche. Pete ‘n’ Me by Tim Marriott is a fictional account of the aftermath of Cook’s disastrous performance at the Cambridge Theatre in November 1972, the first night of ‘Behind the Fridge’ his comeback show with Dudley Moore.

HE started with just four people in the department at an age when many think of retiring. Nineteen years and 1,200 applications later, the voluntary services department at Whittington’s Archway Hospital stands at a remarkable 172 volunteers.
And many of them, past and present, were out in force at the Whittington on Wednesday to say goodbye to the man responsible for the transformation – ex-Islington councillor, judge, headmaster and alderman, Ron Lendon.