It’s a long time since I’ve been back to the National Portrait Gallery and glided up the grandest escalator in western Europe to the restaurant overlooking the roofs of the National Gallery and down Whitehall.   I remember the moment when Jeremy Dixon and Edward Jones triumphantly described how they had persuaded a warder to let them out onto the roof, which I had never done, and discovered the greatest possible view of the institutions of British goverment to match the portraits below.   I was always a bit sceptical that people would find their way up to the top of the building for a cup of tea, but I was quite wrong.

A trip to the National Portrait Gallery to hear Catherine Goodman in conversation with Rachel Campbell-Johnston gave me an opportunity to see the exhibition of Virginia Woolf portraits, not a wholly easy subject because there are not so many of them, mostly photographs, the best of them (and best known) taken when she was 20 by George Beresford, supplemented by studio portraits by Man Ray in 1934 and Gisèle Freund in 1939.   But Frances Spalding has done a good job in giving a sense of her life as a whole, her family and friends, all of them intellectual and intense, dominated by Virginia herself with her fragile beauty and thyroid eyes.

I went to Andrea Rose’s leaving party last night.   It was held not in the British Council, where she has been the long-standing Director of Visual Arts (she joined the British Council in 1979), but just outside, with hordes of the art world present.   It seemed appropriately symbolic, since there were many references to the fact that she was a formidable member of staff and not always in agreement with official policy.   She will be a great loss.

I was interviewed on Japanese television this morning about eighteenth-century gardens.   I was asked if I knew about the response to Linnaeus when he visited London.   I didn’t.   The answer is that he came to London in July 1736 to visit Sir Hans Sloane, the founder of the British Museum, and Philip Miller, who was chief gardener of the Chelsea Physic Garden.   Apparently neither of them was impressed by Linneaus’s new system of classification, since it was too obviously sexual.   They preferred the taxonomy of John Ray.   Thomas Knowlton, who was Lord Burlington’s gardener at Londesborough, thought the Linnaean system ‘altogether whimsicall and ridiculous’.   But I could find no confirmation of the suggestion that Linnaeus called a particularly prickly plant after Miller in revenge.