Writing about drinking by Victor Mallet, Anne Carson, John Lanchester, Wendy Cope, Christopher Hitchens, Tom Jaine, Jenny Diski, Marina Warner, Clancy Martin and John Lloyd.
Marxism is about leisure, not labour. The only good reason for being a socialist, apart from annoying people you don’t like, is that you don’t like to work.
Ablue creature – part platypus, part squid, part amorphous squiggle – scuttles behind a pale three-headed figure with one webbed foot. A naked human form being consumed by (or is it wearing? becoming . . .
Rodrigo Moreno’s The Delinquents has taken a while to reach us. Its premiere was at Cannes in May 2023. The fate of the film imitates, in a way, its main theme. It’s about getting lost, or not getting . . .
Florence has always been at the heart of any history of Renaissance art. The two most obvious reasons for this are the survival, especially in the city itself, of a very large number of works of art . . .
Aband of light, reflected across the waters of Morgan Lake, New Mexico, leads our eyes from the centre foreground to a power plant on the Navajo Reservation: the Four Corners Power Plant, one of the . . .
Perhaps, then – though the thought is a grim one – we turn to Guernica with a kind of nostalgia. Suffering and horror were once this large. They were dreadful, but they had a tragic dimension.
Sinatra’s sexual charge was like his song: underplayed, tinged with unflappable cool picked up second-hand in the shady cloisters of jazz.
Wagner’s work is everywhere preoccupied with boundaries set and overstepped, limits reached and exceeded.
As I drew, things began to change. Quite suddenly something was happening down there on the paper that I had not anticipated. I continued, I went on drawing; I pushed ahead, both intuitively and consciously. The squares began to lose their original form.
A photograph of Abbas Kiarostami in Hamid Dabashi’s book shows him crouching over a frying pan that has two eggs in it. Beside him, and like him focused on the eggs, is the original movie camera invented by Lumière.
‘Studio Vingt-Huit – high up a winding street of Montmartre, in the full blasphemy of a freezing Sunday; taxis arriving, friends greeting each other, an excitable afternoon...
The true foodie knows there is something not quite ... about a coconut kirsch roulade as a concept. It is just a bit ... just a bit Streatham. Its vowels are subtly wrong. It is probably related to a Black Forest gâteau.
When I used to give a survey course for first-year students, I dreaded December. That was when I reached the High Renaissance and my audience fell away. It was not only the alternative seasonable...
Fashion, according to Baudelaire, is a moral affair. It is, more specifically, the obligation laid upon a woman to transform herself, outwardly and visibly, into a work of art, or, at the very...
Writing about drinking by Victor Mallet, Anne Carson, John Lanchester, Wendy Cope, Christopher Hitchens, Tom Jaine, Jenny Diski, Marina Warner, Clancy Martin and John Lloyd.
Writing for Halloween by Leslie Wilson, John Sturrock, Thomas Jones, Michael Newton, Marina Warner and Gavin Francis.
‘Replay’ is Kruger’s term for her reworkings of the early iconic screen prints, transferred from their original formats to free-standing LED video screens. This is the Kruger blueprint: levity shot...
The film keeps threatening to come apart, almost unable to juggle its sorrowful realism with its wild farce. It doesn’t come apart, though, and the survived threat is part of the unshakeable discomfort...
Acid house wasn’t a genre of dance music so much as a new way of experiencing it: audiences dressed down, parties ran all night and – so dancers reported – social divisions disintegrated, helped...
Simmonds’s books and newspaper strips have been a compass for generations of British women, as sure a gauge of who and where they are as Marks and Spencer knickers.
The urge to register one’s presence, even if only with a pseudonym, is a powerful factor in the history of graffiti. It is found when some forbidden or previously inaccessible territory is being explored.
The crack in the promise of the Academy Awards is that American pictures don’t cut it any more. ‘Hollywood’ (if you are prepared to believe that kingdom still exists) doesn’t know how to deliver...
Despite the mistakes, video assistant refereeing works. A 2020 study showed that overall decision accuracy improved with the use of VAR from an already high 92.1 per cent to 98.3 per cent. So what’s...
In its modern incarnations, sport is a spontaneous thing, blowing wherever the fans fancy. Even the impulses that have transformed Britain into a nation of joggers and gym bunnies remain mysterious. They...
It’s not that the locals are in denial about what is going on in the camp. Everyone seems to have incorporated the horrors as real but ignorable aspects of regular existence. Höss and Hedwig not only...
The torture that comes with Ronnie O’Sullivan’s freakish gift is partly down to the fact that he is playing a game where the stakes have become, for most people, so low. But for the fans, the magic...
You can’t own what he shows. Clouds are common property. Phenomena such as sunsets and moonrises suspend distinctions anyway. So much in him is planetary as much as local. There are no frontiers, no...
By the 1950s Scandinavian design principles dominated British architecture schools, and were taken to be the natural model for the new towns, new housing estates and new universities. The frustrated young...
Marie Laurencin’s independence and her refusal to pander to her patrons only makes her more compelling as a ‘femme peintre’. Like Helena Rubinstein and Coco Chanel, she was ambitious and not always...
Is Bella Baxter an unruly kind of feminist? Yes, in a way, but before we make this claim we need to understand what else she is – principally an uninformed child in an adult body.
As always in Guston, there is a sense of what cannot be shown, or has been erased, and can only be gestured towards: ropes instead of lynchings, clubs and sticks instead of beatings. But the props look...
Rock crystal’s status stemmed from its rarity and its extraordinary beauty, made even more glorious through carving and polishing. But above all it was the stone’s unparalleled clarity that provoked...
Netflix has reversed the classical publishing strategy of throwing content at the wall of public indifference in the hope something will stick. It sees a scattered public whose attention can be pinned...
Although they were designed to elevate the periphery by decentring the city, the villes nouvelles achieved the opposite effect: alienating a rapidly impoverished ring from the core. The suburban monorail...
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