Betty and William Jacklin, 1942, Private Collection

 There are bloggers who keep calm and carry on through hot weather and there are others who can only promise that normal service will be resumed when a whisper of cooler air comes through the window. But yesterday evening I pulled myself together and headed off to the blissful cool of the Laura Knight Portraits exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery ... hardly a soul there. It's quite a small exhibition, if anybody is thinking of coming to London specially, but who needs a midsummer blockbuster? I couldn't help being drawn to this lovely little painting of William Jacklin and thought how proud his mum must have been as she coaxed that curl in his hair. Wouldn't it make a wonderful book-jacket? I love the lumpy hand-knitted baby clothes and the Startrite shoes which was exactly the same kit as I'm wearing in baby photos 15 years later. But I also wondered if that cabbage-chomping bunny ended up in the wartime pot? I'm reading Anne Sebba's biography of Enid Bagnold, who kept so many rabbits for Victory that she was able to eat two a week and boasted that her fried rabbit was so good that nobody could tell that it wasn't chicken Maryland. (The missing fried bananas might have been a giveaway, but I'm digressing.)

The Nuremberg Trial, 1946, Imperial War Museum

The painting that really stood out, however, was this one although I've seen it before, but I stood and looked at it for a long time, thinking about Laura (who was 68 in 1946) looking down at this scene from the press box. Her diaries from the trial are exhibited nearby and it was fascinating to read about her locking eyes with Rudolf Hess (he's the one with the bald patch, second from the top on the middle row), how she wanted to smile (but why? some kind of excruciating social embarrassment?) but couldn't pull her eyes away from his 'cruel silk stare.'  She wondered if the prisoners would be upset that she was sketching them but was told that, quite the reverse, they were probably pleased. I got the impression that Knight only listened sporadically through headphones to the evidence but I'd love to  read more of her diary. How terribly ordinary those men look; immediately below her, she looked down on the president of the Reichsbank, silver-haired, suited, respectable, leaning his head on his hand ...  and you'd think he was one of the lawyers in the front row.

For those who don't live in London, this exhibition will eventually make its way to Newcastle and Plymouth.