Jealousy, madness, kidnap, death

"... on her husband's orders, on a January night, a group of Highlanders broke into Rachel's lodgings on Niddry’s Wynd, Edinburgh, and attacked her, knocking out some of her teeth. They tied her up and carried her out 'as if she was a corpse' ..."

Read the tragic story of Lady Grange here Exiled to St Kilda. Government's may fall, but historical trivia will always have its place in a Saturday edition.

On the pleasures of ownership

Climbing the staircase to the very top of his 19th century townhouse in the middle of Geneva, Jean Bonna itemises each magnificent work of art as he shuffles past, pausing a couple of times to gesture and offer an observation.

“Here you have some of the Italians,” he says languidly. “Castiglione … another Tiepolo. Those are three of the Durer prints of the unicorn. This is the Whore of Babylon” At the top of the staircase he pauses, and then heads off into an airy room. “Now this Courbet, it really is absolutely exceptional. And the Delacroix and the Gericault… “

The list goes on and on, through all three floors of his house. This Friday, the most spectacular of this endless parade of drawings will find their way into an Edinburgh exhibition: Raphael to Renoir: Master Drawings from the collection of Jean Bonna. It is, as they say, unmissable.

The show is the only European outing of a unique selection of artworks originally chosen by curators from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It will form the centrepiece of the National Gallery of Scotland’s festival exhibition schedule, an extraordinary display of works, which together capture, as Mr Bonna puts it, “the first thoughts” of the great artists. “Even when they are finished drawings,” he says, “they are more immediate than a painting, more spontaneous. There is movement, more life.”

Each of the Edinburgh works is taken from the walls of this rambling, very intimate house. From Raphael’s Study of Soldiers (which normally adorns the ground-floor sitting room) via Woman in a White Bonnet by George Seurat, and Odilon Redon’s vibrant pastel, La Barque, they hang in its bedrooms and parlours, the corridors and anterooms, arranged for their owner’s particular delight.

Mr Bonna, now retired, was the fifth generation of his family to enter the well-rewarded and very grown-up world of merchant banking, but he has been an incorrigible collector, since childhood. When he was 11, he was gifted a book written by the president of the Bouquinistes – or booksellers – of the Paris Quais, even then inscribed “to one of my good clients”.

Thus encouraged, for decades French Literature consumed him, until he had collected everything, “from the first literary work to the beginning of the 20th century”. Everything? It seems an astonishing claim. This dapper little man in his neat jacket, a striped shirt and braces, stops and considers for a moment. “I am missing maybe 15 major books.” he says thoughtfully.

But it was never just about literature for Mr Bonna. He has knitted together in his many different collections a personal world of high culture, in which his own good taste is arbiter.

There are autographs of most of those French authors, from A to Zola, filed away in a cabinet on the third floor of the house. The Durers on the staircase are symbols of what he modestly calls “the nucleus of a print collection”. He has an assortment of Louis XV and Louis XVI chairs and other antique furniture; an array of vintage photography; and what he describes as “a few bronzes and a few terracottas”. He loves music, though he protests that he doesn’t collect it. “I have a few things by Wagner I could show you,” he says, “but that is slightly besides the point.” Mr Bonna, in his mid-sixties, even collects ex-wives – there are two of those bumping around Switzerland.

Drawings by the great masters, however, have been the heart of his obsession for the best part of 25 years. He purchased his first in 1985, L’Aubergiste courtisee (The Courted Maid) by Hubert Robert, though it was three years before he bought again at Christie’s in New York.

Gradually he met dealers, curators and other collectors, becoming immersed in a whole new world of high culture, studying, learning and buying whenever he found something he liked and could afford. The 120 drawings he has loaned for the Edinburgh show represent slightly more than a third of his total collection, and the larger portion will remain on the walls of this house. He even employs two full-time curators.

There is a price on all this. Over these last two decades he has parted, he admits, with millions of dollars, including the [euros]650,000 he spent at auction on Parmigianino’s The Holy Family with Shepherds and Angels, a work he describes as “the most important Italian old master drawing, his best study for his finest painting”.

But playing this market is not just about wealth, he insists. “‘Means’, as they say in France, ‘is a condition which is necessary, but not sufficient,’” he says. “The first quality you require to build a collection of either books or drawings is passion. It you are not passionate you do not do it. Even when I was working, if I had a free hour, I would visit antique shops, a dealer, a museum, a curator. It consumed all my time, besides my profession and my family. It takes you over completely.”

Mr Bonna’s passion for art never ends. In a drawing collection, he says, each image has a different subject, and their number is almost limitless. Theoretically you could collect forever, though there are constraints.

“If you decide to make a collection, say, of French literature, you will inevitably buy an author which you don’t like. I am not particularly fond of Rousseau but I still have everything written by him, in first edition and in contemporary bindings, because he is very important in the history of ideas. But you could never buy a drawing you don’t like – or at least I cannot,” he says.

He has a some tips for anyone with a few spare shekels and time to cultivate the market. It is not wise to buy at auction too often, he advises, it only antagonises the dealers. Better to cultivate the dealers and curators, and keep track of the ownership of the finest drawings – this way you’ll know in advance when an opportunity to buy might arise.

And learn where to shop for bargains., he says Not at flea markets – “I never find things in flea markets” – but at booksellers who will occasionally buy whole libraries from dying collectors. Often there are drawings in among these books, and the dealers sometimes have little idea of their true worth. Occasionally, Mr Bonna has left a shop with an old master in a paper bag, worth many times its purchase price, and a satisfied smile on his lips.

From such efforts, great collections grow, and with them a warm sensation which he recognises as the pleasure of possession. “I wouldn’t say it made you feel good or even better. You simply feel different.”

Can he define the pleasure of passion more precisely? Mr Bonna has an anecdote to encapsulate exactly what he means. He recently spent a fascinating day at the Uffizi in Florence, poring over the drawing collections, and absorbing the wisdom of the curators. It was absolutely fascinating, he says.

“But ownership is another ingredient altogether,” he adds, suddenly animated. “To have a Raphael on your own wall – when you come home at night you can say: ‘This is mine!’”

* Raphael to Renoir: Master Drawings from the Collection of Jean Bonna, 5th June to 6th September. £4 (£3). National Galleries complex, the Mound, Edinburgh.

Beaver - tastes like ...

This morning the mood in Mid Argyll matches the weather: warm, sunny, optimistic. Darren Dobson, the native Isle-of-Wighter, who moved north and took over the Cairnbaan Hotel ten years ago, is convinced that the beaver is a good news story.

“It’s great for the profile of the area. It’s such a beautiful place. We’ve sea eagles and pine martens - and now beavers. It’s a wonderful day, it will bring many more visitors in,” he says. The hotel proprietor is a keen angler and has made it is business, he says, to research the beasts’ impact on fishing stocks. He has not found any evidence of harm. If he had, he says, he would stand “shoulder-to-shoulder with my fellow anglers”.

So keen is Mr Dobson to get his head round his subject, he has even eaten beaver. Tastes like chicken? “Like rabbit, actually,” he says. “I had it on fajitas. In Norway.”

This line never made it into the final copy, which appears here: Beavers back in Scotland.

Voice from the gods says 'fudge'

Fudge. Fudgetastic. Fudgalicious. Only an institution as innocent and unworldly as the Church of Scotland could end 17 years of debate on homosexuality with a victory acclaimed by the winners as “fudge”.

In the corridors of New College, Edinburgh, as midnight loomed, smiling liberals grinned at the very notion of it; minsters in earrings slapped each other’s backs and lauded its very creation. And on the floor of the Assembly Hall, where the appointment was approved of Scott Rennie an openly-gay minister, to Queen’s Cross Church in Aberdeen, Rev George Whyte wallowed in the sticky sweetness of it all.

“Moderator” concluded Mr Whyte, after more than four hours of debate, “it’s been said I’m proposing ‘a fudge’. I don’t regard that as a great insult …” and on he rattled in his sugary tongue, to glory.

From the rousing chords of Spirit of Truth and Grace Come to us in this Place, which opened proceedings, it was plain that this would be a passionate encounter. It was by turns eloquent and polite, revelatory and occasionally emotional. And always, appearances were deceptive.

A muscular pastor, unwittingly sporting a pink tie, spoke out against Mr Rennie’s appointment. From the other side, a white haired gentlemen in a tweed suit, every inch, it seemed, the social conservative, spoke up for the gay minister. Rev Derek Browning – a card-carrying tree-hugger on any other evening of the year - seemed ready to start a fight. “The church does stand at a crossroads tonight,” growled Mr Browning, “God is calling us to break new ground,” and a few evangelical foreheads, he almost added. His liberal allies soon drowned him in fudge.

In truth, the vote had been tipped against the evangelicals by a procedural manoeuvre on Thursday, when the Assembly voted to hear Mr Rennie’s case ahead of an overture proposed by conservative Lochcarron and Skye Presbytery, which would have banned “two men in a manse”.

In the event, the evangelicals were forced to deal first with the whys and wherefores of the decision of Aberdeen Presbytery to appoint their new minister. Here they were on difficult legal ground, attempting to persuade commissioners that Rev George Cowie, the apparently saintly presbytery clerk, was in fact Beelzebub in disguise. Mr Cowie hair stands on end, but nothing about his imperturbable demeanour suggested that his astonishing wind-blown barnet concealed horns.

The structure of the debate also required another Aberdonian, Ian Aitken, to lead for the evangelicals.. Mr Atiken is a good preacher, but not a brilliant preacher, a master of the pernickety legal details of the case, but apt to slip when he stumbled into areas where bodily fluids flowed.

A question from the gods floored him. Rev James L Wilson leant over the first floor balcony to enquire: “There’s a whole gamut in marriage beyond sex – what do you mean by homosexual practice?” The moderator smiled. Homosexual practice? Mr Aitken stood up, burbled, grunted and sat down again. It didn’t sound good. In theological debate, like life, practice makes perfect.

There was a strong news piece out of this debate, which you can read here: Evangelicals vow to hold back cash after Scott Rennie defeat.

Kirk plunges into the great gay debate

It took only one hour for the issue that could split the Church of Scotland to surface. After the pomp of the General Assembly's opening ceremony had died down and once the tea cups were put away after the morning break, the first intervention came. Not surprisingly, it came from the hard-liners.

No one doubts that this weekend will be epoch-making for the Kirk. Whether it accepts the appointment of the Rev Scott Rennie - an openly gay minister and divorced father of one - has become its defining issue. Such are the passions aroused that many believe that the Kirk is on the brink of its first schism since the Disruption of 1843, which led to the formation of the Free Church of Scotland.

The debate about gay ministers has rumbled on since January, when Mr Rennie's opponents succeeded in referring his appointment to this Assembly for judgment. It has earned acres of newspaper print, provoked passionate radio phone-in debates and kept blogging ministers glued to their computers. The result was, as the Rev Derek Browning told a packed Assembly Hall in Edinburgh: “The eyes of the Church, the eyes of the country and the eyes of the wider world are upon us at this time.”

In the event it was the evangelicals who suffered the first defeat, failing to win a procedural motion that they thought would ensure Mr Rennie's appointment was rescinded. Led by the Presbytery of Lochcarron and Skye, they had hoped to define Church policy on homosexuality by winning an overture (motion) on sexual morality tomorrow evening, before the Assembly, the highest court in the Church, was due to decide Mr Rennie's case.

“There is a danger that we will make a decision [about homosexuality] based on the prevailing culture of our time,” said the Rev Peter B.Park, who moved the procedural amendment. He was defeated, but while some saw the two-thirds majority as an omen of the decisive defeat they hope to inflict on the evangelicals tomorrow, others insisted that the coming vote was far from cut and dried.

Members of Aberdeen's Queen's Cross Church had voted overwhelmingly to appoint Mr Rennie, who lives with his partner at Brechin Cathedral, with Aberdeen Presbytery endorsing their appointment.

The case against his appointment has been led by the evangelical organisation Forward Together. While it is easy to suggest that their anti-gay support is predominantly drawn from far-flung parishes in the north and the Western Isles, and the Orange Order heartlands of Lanarkshire and Ayrshire, its theological position - that the Bible does not permit the appointment of a gay minister - has a much broader base.

Edinburgh parish ministers spoke on both sides of the debate, illustrating the depth of the divide. One, the Rev Jerry Middleton, from Davidsons Mains, said that the overture would “affirm and clarify the principles underlying basic Christian morality”. Mr Browning, from Morningside, disagreed, saying: “It is not right to depart from what is right, what is fair and what is just.”

From the anti-gay grouping, there is a sense that the Church authorities had deliberately timed the debate to sit in a “graveyard slot” so they could quietly approve Mr Rennie's appointment. No one now expects the debate to be quiet or brief.

Some who support the evangelicals' theological position have been appalled by the personal attacks on Mr Rennie. Forward Together has already issued a pubic apology to the minister over false claims about his personal life. No sooner had that apology been issued than the Rev Ian Watson, the secretary of the organisation, published a 3,500-word sermon comparing the fight against homosexuality with the fight against the Nazis, which was condemned by many of his peers.

A month ago, the debate was stirred again when Life and Work, the Kirk's house magazine, published a piece in support of Mr Rennie by Muriel Armstrong, its outgoing editor. She said that yesterday's vote did not mean that the evangelicals would be defeated. “I do think there is a moderate majority in the middle. The Church is defined by its moderate majority but whether that moderate majority is represented here I don't know,” she said.

Should the evangelicals be defeated, allies in other churches are ready to reach out to them. The Monthly Record, the magazine of the Free Church of Scotland, appealed to evangelicals to join them in a new united British Presbyterian Church.

Ministers opposed to Mr Rennie said that they would not walk away from the Church, and at all times in the debate they remained respectful to the Moderator. “Wait till Saturday night,” said one commissioner, “then you'll see the fire in their eyes.”

Art, by Jupiter!

The view from the end of Nicky Wilson’s garden is incomparable. Southwards, over the rooftops of Wilkieston village, loom the Pentland Hills; east, beyond rolling green fields, lies Edinburgh; and towering 30 feet above her head is the vivid yellow bulb of a giant orchid, made of steel aluminium and created by the sculptor Marc Quinn.

“Amazing isn’t it?” said Mrs Wilson cheerily. “Marc positioned Love Bomb opposite the house. He said to me, ‘Scotland has such terrible weather, you’ll want to come out of the house and see something colourful.’”

Mrs Wilson, 42, housewife, mother and owner of nine miniature donkeys, is the moving spirit behind Jupiter Artland, the title she has given to her 80-acre estate in West Lothian.

If the name sounds grandiose, it’s probably deliberate, reflecting an artistic indulgence to match the wildest Victorian folly. In essence she has commissioned more than 20 works by contemporary artists, urging them to respond to the grounds of her 17th-century country home, Bonnington House.

The responses are often of epic proportion. Quinn’s 12-metre orchid is the work of the artist who created the sculpture of Alison Lapper Pregnant for the fifth plinth in Trafalgar Square. In the woods, Temple of Apollo and a head of Sappho represent the last works of the late Ian Hamilton Finlay.

The entrance driveway to the house winds through a terraced landscape moulded by Charles Jencks, a creation so vast it dwarfs even Landform, his best-known work, which fills the grounds in front of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.

Even the bollards by the road are by Antony Gormley, and the garden gate, by Ben Tindall, is all twisty vines mingled with blooming metal flowers. “Looks like a flu virus doesn’t it?” Mrs Wilson said. “Don’t write that down.”

This was a great day out. Read more here By Jupiter.

The pic, as many more have been here recently, is by James Glossop. Remember that name. The lad is minor genius.

Paedophile gang found guilty

The Times, Friday, May 8, 2009

A paedophile gang that carried out a series of attacks on children and infants, including a three-month-old baby, were found guilty yesterday at the High Court in Edinburgh in a groundbreaking legal case.

The abusers, including a respected youth leader — who had met Tony Blair and the Queen — a civil servant, a bank clerk and a Church of Scotland elder, were part of the largest paedophile network to have been dismantled in Scotland.

The convictions were the culmination of an 18-month international police operation codenamed Algebra, which has identified a further 70 suspects in 16 regions of Britain and led to action against another 35 suspected child abusers.

Police and the prosecution hailed the verdicts as an important advance in the fight against child sexual abuse. For the first time in Scottish legal history the Crown brought a case of conspiracy to participate in the commission of sexual offences. Advocate Depute Dorothy Bain, QC, asked for a full risk assessment for two members of the gang; Neil Strachan, who has previous convictions for child abuse, and James Rennie, a respected youth leader and gay rights campaigner who met Mr Blair and the Queen in the course of his work.

The move would allow the court to impose an order for lifelong restriction, which would enable a judge to set a minimum sentence, and the men would be freed only when the parole board considered they were no longer a risk to the public.

Lord Bannatyne, the judge, described the gang’s crimes as “utterly horrific”.

The seven men and seven women of the jury sat through nine weeks of evidence, which presented a selection from a total of 125,000 still and video images shared among the eight men on trial, and a log of internet chatroom conversations revealing the extent to which child-sex abuse had engulfed their lives,

These digital records detailed how Strachan and Rennie were able to breach relationships of trust formed with friends, procure and abuse their children, then invite their paedophile circle to assault the children too.

Detective Inspector Stuart Hood, who led Operation Algebra, said that this breach of trust had been horrific and hugely significant, illustrating the plausibility which these serial sex offenders brought to their apparently normal lives.

Rennie was able to abuse the three-month-old baby of close friends without them suspecting him. He gave the child presents, was allowed to change its nappies and babysat for the couple. It was only when police arrived with images of abuse that the couple realised any crime had been committed.

In a statement issued last night the couple said: “For 15 years James Rennie seemed the closest of family friends, and . . . it would be fair to state that he was with us, appearing to give friendship and support, during the most difficult and vulnerable times in our lives. To subsequently learn that he abused our son, and invited others to do the same, has been devastating. As a family we have had to learn to live, and cope with, the effect these horrific events have had.”

Read more of a Times splash here: Guilty men.

This is the follow-up, from today's paper, in which a leading psychologist warns of a new kind of sex criminal emerging from the internet: compulsive disorder.

The blog entry below is the long "backgrounder", which appeared in the Scottish edition, and reveals how Strachan, Rennie and the rest were tracked down.

This was an indescribably shocking case to cover, but there was a grim satisfaction in court that these men were found guilty of conspiracy and are likely to go down for a very long time. As one of the detectives said to me, Scotland will be a safer place because of that verdict. I'm not one to hand out praise to the police every day of the week, but they were absolutely magnificent in this case.