A Diary of Dogs

The Royal Academy’s covetable compendium of canines contains a perpetual calendar useful for birthdays and recurring reminders as well as appointments. Each week faces an image by an artist associated with the Royal Academy, among them Edwin Landseer, David Hockney, Mary Fedden, David Remfry and Kyffin Williams. Their four-legged sitters encompass a multitude of breeds, from collie to cockapoo, greyhound to Great Dane, Pekingese to poodle, mastiff to plain old mutt. As W. H. Auden observed, ‘In times of joy, all of us wished we possessed a tail we could wag.’