This sensual painting, by Victorian artist Frederic, Lord Leighton depicts a languorous long-limbed female beauty barely clothed in sheer see-through orange and curled up asleep on a couch drenched by the rays of the setting Mediterranean sun.

It is one of the most memorable and reproduced images in the history of British art, was painted by Leighton in 1895 and sold during the 1970’s, a very bad time to sell Victorian art, to an art gallery in Puerto Rico for around £900. Today it would sell for millions.

Flaming June is featured in an exhibition of five of Leighton’s paintings – Flaming June: the Making of an Icon – which runs at Leighton’s studio and residence in Holland Park, London, now the Leighton House Museum, until April 2.

Look’s like the old Overpayment scam is working its way into the events industry.

We are grateful to reader Cindy-Michelle Waterfield of iwantaspeaker.com for her update of how it is being operated, and how the old adage that “If it’s too good to be true it probably is” is such a good and true one. Continue reading →

More than 35 bodies have been recovered from the ramshackle Ghost Ship warehouse venue in Oakland, California after a blaze swept through the building on December 2 while a party was being held there.

No cause of the fire has yet been found but it is known that the venue was not fitted with smoke detectors or a working sprinkler system and had never been inspected for fire safety by Oakland’s Fire department, which is currently understaffed, with 63 job vacancies unfilled.

Eleven people died and more than 70 were injured when a major fire started in the ground floor kitchen of the luxury Regent Plaza Hotel, Karachi, Pakistan on December 5.

Most deaths were from smoke inhalation and most were trapped on upper floors, with many who survived having to hang knotted bedsheets out of the windows of their rooms and climb down.

Most of Pakistans buildings have sub-standard fire safety and it has been reported that the hotel did not have any emergency exits.

Diners looking to try the three Michelin starred food at Mayfair restaurant Le Gavroche in 2017 could well rue the day they go if it’s after the end of January.

This is when the 13% service charge levied by owner Michel Roux Jr (56) ceases to be discretionary and becomes compulsory, with Roux regarding it as revenue, rather than a payment to share between his staff, and pocketing the lot, in the same way that some cheap chain restaurants do. Continue reading →

The £44million 8,000 seat York Stadium is set to suffer more delays in completion after IGS, its main contractor pulled out citing delays due to an official review and increasing cost pressures as reasons. (The Business Desk)

The City of York council say they are “fully committed” to the stadium which, when built, will include a 13-screen cinema and provide a home for York City FC and the York City Knoghts rugby club.

Registration company Eventbrite have published a list of ten things that event managers can never get right for all their delegates.

These are the level of the content, the amount of activity, the amount (or not) of communication, the location, the price, the catering, the starting/finishing times, the number of delegates, the volume of the AV and the temperature in the room. Continue reading →

A shift manager in his 30s has been sacked from the 3-star Best Western Walworth Castle Hotel, Darlington, County Durham after a young woman staying at the hotel in October complained that he had peered through the bathroom window of her ground-floor room as she stood there naked. Continue reading →

Creepy it is, and eerie, disturbing, macabre and surreal, just some of the descriptions of the latest psychological thriller from Japanese director and horror genre specialist Kiyoshi Kurosawa, whose technique has been compared to that of the late and great Stanley Kubrick. Continue reading →