COUNTRY TO COUNTRY

 How the Pandemic Resurrected Britain’s Ancient Borders From popping in for a pint to putting on the green, erratic lockdowns have left locals in limbo along the English-Welsh border. Tracey Jones sits in her shuttered pub, contemplating the last six months and the invisible barrier just outside the door. The pub Jones took over in October, The Bridge Inn, is named for the nearby crossing over the Ceiriog River, which, along this stretch, marks the border between England and Wales. Jones’s establishment is in England, but the Welsh town of Chirk is just across the river. For years, the international border just a stone’s throw from the pub didn’t matter. “The majority of our regular drinkers are from Chirk,” says Jones. “Even though the pub is situated on the English side of the border, it’s really considered to be a predominantly Welsh pub.” COVID-19 changed all of that. Thanks to erratic and uncoordinated lockdowns—some ordered by London, others by the Welsh government in Cardiff...

Gagosian Britannia, London Part of a year-long residency at the gallery, the artist’s initial show, with Coke vending machines, rubbish bags and cow’s tongues a-lolling, is dispiriting. Damien Hirst has begun a year-long “takeover” of the echoing concrete-floored spaces of Gagosian Britannia Street. There’s even a readymade hashtag #HirstTakeover, like a cry for attention. I can’t see how a year-long exposure in a single commercial gallery can be good for any artist, but with Hirst showing something somewhere all the time anyway, I don’t suppose it will stretch him too much. It is the staff at the London gallery I worry about. The works will be changing over the year, but no details are available. The works filling the gallery presently come under the rubric of Fact Paintings and Fact Sculptures, and span more than 20 years between 1993 and the present. The earliest work is a cow’s head, with tongue lolling, bleeding quietly on the gallery floor. If it is blood (there might be health a...

  Arabian coins found in US may unlock 17th-century pirate mystery. Discovery may explain escape of Capt Henry Every after murderous raid on Indian emperor’s ship .  A handful of coins unearthed from a pick-your-own-fruit orchard in the US state of Rhode Island and other random corners of New England may help solve a centuries-old cold case. The villain in this tale: a murderous English pirate who became the world’s most-wanted criminal after plundering a ship carrying Muslim pilgrims home to India from Mecca, then eluded capture by posing as a slave trader. Jim Bailey, an amateur historian and metal detectorist, found the first intact 17th-century Arabian coin in a meadow in Middletown. That ancient pocket change – the oldest ever found in North America – could explain how pirate Capt Henry Every vanished. On 7 September 1695, the pirate ship Fancy, commanded by Every, ambushed and captured the Ganj-i-Sawai, a royal vessel owned by the Indian emperor Aurangzeb, then one of th...