Most of the distinctive work by talented artist David Burton was left to be trampled under foot, writes Dan Carrier

DAVID Burton spent most of his adult life working outdoors on his hands and knees. He was half-blind, having been born without sight in one eye, yet managed to scrape a living chalking pictures on the pavements of Rosslyn Hill, Hampstead.
But he also painted watercolours, thanks to a remarkable patron who recognised his talent while out visiting the sculptor Henry Moore, and now the story of the down and out pavement artist and high-society art dealer can now be revealed 60 years after his death.
This week a leading Kensington art dealer is hosting a show of his watercolours – and the exhibition at the Duncan Campbell Gallery in Thackeray Street will be the first time his work has been hung in a gallery since 1938.

Journalist and author Jonathan Freedland says this week’s Jewish literary festival will be of interest to everyone

THEY always say that one of the big perks of being a Londoner is the abundance of culture. All around us are museums, theatres, libraries and more cinemas than you could visit in a year. Outside London, we’re told, it’s a cultural desert.
Stray from the big cities, and you’ll be in a land where your brain could shrivel through lack of stimulation.

The last days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was the background to a royal scandal which shocked Europe, writes Peter Gruner

LONG before Princess Diana tipped her head coquettishly as she shocked the world with revelations of love, sex, and betrayal, another royal figure was busy writing her memoirs of similarly tempestuous and illicit affairs.
But unlike modern merry England – where the main protagonists fight it out in, and often for, the newspapers – this was the stiff and formal court of Emperor Franz, “who pulled on his whiskers and looked like the head butler” in the last days of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Here, when a chap’s pride was wounded over a woman, he might click his heels and challenge his rival to a duel.