Francis Gooding

Half​ acrobat, half can-can dancer, Picasso’s Salome kicks her leg up as Herod Antipas, corpulent and sagging, takes in the spectacle, flanked by his bride, dark-eyed Herodias. The king’s rheumy gaze is fixed on his stepdaughter’s nakedness. In the corner, a kneeling servant proffers Salome’s reward, chosen at her mother’s behest: the severed head of John the...

Maurice Godelier’​s Forbidden Fruit is a small book about a big subject. It can afford to be short because, despite all the ink spilled and pencils chewed, what is known about incest and its prohibition can be summarised quite succinctly. The origin of the incest taboo is still a mystery, and though many theories have been proposed, few universal conclusions can safely be drawn; like...

Culebras, or ‘snakes’, come in a twist of three, tightly plaited and bound by ribbon. Their history is obscure: perhaps the style arose because parsimonious cigar-factory bosses wanted to restrict the cigar-rolling torcedores to an allotment of three cigars a day; perhaps it was an innovation from the tobacco plantations of the Philippines, intended to yield a...

There is a great deal of modern British military history that the IWM simply cannot present to the public, except in adumbrated form. War might be hell, but with the exception of the Nazis, the people condemned to it are not to be held responsible for its horrors. 

MC​ Shan really shouldn’t have done it. By common consent, hip-hop didn’t start in Queens, it started in the Bronx. So when Shan, on his 1986 track ‘The Bridge’, put Queensbridge Houses at the centre of his potted history of rap without so much as mentioning the Bronx, there was going to be pushback. It duly arrived with ‘The Bridge Is Over’, from Boogie...