As this issue went to press, it seemed that Italy was on the brink of forming a new government, nearly ten weeks after the general election of 4th March. It will almost certainly be a coalition between the populist Five Star Movement and the far right Northern League. As a result, there will be a new Minister of Cultural Heritage to replace Dario Franceschini, the centre-left politician who instituted the radical reform of Italy’s museums that led to the appointment in 2016 of twenty new directors of major institutions, seven of whom were – controversially in Italy – non-Italians.

A comprehensive, intelligent exhibition of the British studio pottery movement has long been awaited. Previous attempts have lacked either sufficient funding or sufficient depth of scholarship, or both. The exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, organised in collaboration with the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, where it was previously shown (14th September–3rd December 2017), has raised expectations but proves a less than successful attempt to do justice to a movement that changed the nature of art ceramics across the globe.1