Idea for February 2022: 1922

My idea of the month is 1922

A momentous year, now a century ago: the very apogee of modernism. Ezra Pound called it ‘year zero’. This was the year of Ulysses and The Waste Land, of Nosferatu and Cocteau’s Antigone. The year that – amazingly – Diaghilev, Stravinsky, Picasso, Proust, Joyce and Satie had dinner together in Paris. The year that the BBC and the USSR were created, and the Irish Free State established. And, by the way, the year my father was born.

My image of the month is Terence Conran

The man who introduced me to design. I was brought up in dowdy Gloucester, and when Habitat opened in Cheltenham in (I think) 1971, I encountered a new visual world. Jump to 2022, and Habitat is in every Sainsbury’s - not quite the original high style, but Conran would, I think, have approved of this democratisation of his vision. (I’ve just been reading this biography, which is too long and very repetitive – and reveals more about Stephen Bayley than about Terence Conran – but it’s still an entertaining read.)