On Hope Mirrlees

Clair Wills, 10 September 2020

... Seine                        DUBONNETThe Scarlet Woman shouting BYRRH and deafeningSt John at Patmos                        Vous descendez Madame?   QUI SOUVENT SE PESE BIEN SE CONNAIT   QUI BIEN SE CONNAIT BIEN SE PORTE                        CONCORDEToday’s reader has no difficulty decoding the fragmented style and ...

At Tate Britain

Rosemary Hill: Aubrey Beardsley, 24 September 2020

... comes only, in Salome, with death. The Climax shows Salome holding up the severed head of John the Baptist to look him in the eyes, beside the lines: ‘J’ai baisé ta bouche Iokanaan/J’ai baisé ta bouche.’ Below and between the two a phallic lily rises. The Art Journal found Beardsley’s work upsetting, ‘terrible in its weirdness’, full ...

Christmas Trees

Alice Spawls, 5 January 2017

... chic (the ready-dressed blue and silver faux-fir). For the unsure, there are ‘treetorials’ at John Lewis or ‘Christmas design consultation’ for £250. They’ll even decorate your tree for you. Most companies are cleverer with their own displays now, and recognise the opportunity for spectacle. You don’t even need the tree – just a surprising ...

At Dia:Beacon

Hal Foster: Fetishistic Minimalist, 5 June 2003

... Hesse? Others don’t seem to belong here: despite the apparent novelty, the crushed car parts of John Chamberlain and the large abstract spider by Louise Bourgeois are more conventional as sculpture than other objects on view.Several artists live up to top billing. The galleries devoted to the white monochromes of Robert Ryman allow us to see, as in a ...

On Joan Murray

Patrick McGuinness: Joan Murray, 20 December 2018

... and photocopies of photocopies, distributed for teaching or among friends and colleagues. In 2003, John Ashbery claimed that a trunk containing Murray’s manuscripts had been lost by removal men when her papers were being shipped to the archive at Smith College where they are now held. In 2014, an inquiry by Mark Ford, who’d written on Murray for ...

Young Men in Flames

Ulinka Rublack: Tudor Art, 18 July 2024

Tudor Liveliness: Vivid Art in Post-Reformation England 
by Christina J. Faraday.
Paul Mellon, 198 pp., £45, April 2023, 978 1 913107 37 6
Show More
Show More
... The Tudors could be extravagant in other media, often building on foreign expertise. Consider John Caius’s memorial in Cambridge, probably carved by Theodore Haveus, a Fleming or German from Cleves who settled in England in 1562. After Caius’s death in 1573, his tomb lay above ground for the next six decades. Anyone entering the chapel would first ...

At the National Gallery

Peter Campbell: Caravaggio’s final years, 31 March 2005

... for Christ to be tied to, it is without fluting. A rusticated arch in the late Beheading of St John and the manger in a Nativity are unclear. Clouds supporting angels and broad swathes of drapery may make strong patterns against these backgrounds, but even the angels seem to be contained in the same shallow space as the other figures.Photographers and ...

Shining Pink

Tam Dalyell, 23 May 1985

Death of a Rose-Grower: Who killed Hilda Murrell? 
by Graham Smith.
Cecil Woolf, 96 pp., £5.95, April 1985, 0 900821 76 0
Show More
Show More
... chronicles the work done by three investigative reporters, Stuart Prebble of World in Action, and John Osmond and David Williams of Harlech Television. Along with a police reconstruction on the BBC’s Crime-watch, they have ensured that literally millions of people are familiar with the basic circumstances of the crime. There was a moment when every amateur ...

At the British Museum

Vivien Bird: Richard Payne Knight’s Bequest, 11 September 2025

... but he recognised their importance. The exhibition includes The Holy Family with the Infant St John, the first drawing by Michelangelo to enter the British Museum’s collection. It is a pity that more is not made of Payne Knight’s other interests and bequests. As the curators of the exhibition point out, the ‘superb quality’ of his collection of ...

Diary

Blake Morrison: On the Independent on Sunday , 27 May 1993

... air, and whose voice reminded me for some reason of the first person ever to give me a job, John Gross. One of Stephen’s favourite words was ‘collegiate’, and this seemed to be his model for the paper: it would be run by a few chaps who liked tossing around ideas with other chaps, and would be read by chaps in JCRs rather than JCBs. Over breakfast ...

A Resonance for William Styron

Gabriele Annan, 7 November 1985

Savage Grace 
by Natalie Robins and Steven Aronson.
Gollancz, 473 pp., £10.95, October 1985, 0 575 03738 5
Show More
Show More
... the entries in Who’s Who. There are some known names: Cecil Beaton, Jasper Johns, James Jones, John Mortimer, Patricia Neal, William Styron, Andy Warhol. Among the rest are antique dealers, decorators, magazine editors, a ‘freelance music co-ordinator for fashion shows’, a princess ‘internationally concerned with matters of spiritual evolution’, an ...

Diary

Christian Lorentzen: Are books like nappies?, 2 August 2012

... In his comprehensive study of contemporary publishing in the US and the UK, Merchants of Culture, John Thompson argues that books like the ones reviewed in these pages will be around as long as publishers value symbolic capital, and that readers will continue to prefer to read those books, unlike encyclopedias, as paper rather than bytes.* The denuded ...

Sessions with a Poker

Christian Lorentzen: Sessions with a Poker, 24 September 2015

A Little Life 
by Hanya Yanagihara.
Picador, 720 pp., £16.99, August 2015, 978 1 4472 9481 8
Show More
Show More
... He runs away, sells his body on the road and catches a venereal disease. He’s picked up by a john who claims to be a physician called Dr Traylor, and promises to cure him with antibiotics. He makes good on that pledge, but also locks Jude in his basement for three months as his sex slave, for sessions with a poker. Offering release, the doctor tells Jude ...

Paradise Lost

Nicholas Everett, 11 July 1991

Omeros 
by Derek Walcott.
Faber, 325 pp., £17.50, September 1990, 0 571 16070 0
Show More
Collected Poems 
by Norman MacCaig.
Chatto, 456 pp., £18, September 1990, 0 7011 3713 4
Show More
The Mail from Anywhere 
by Brad Leithauser.
Oxford, 55 pp., £5.95, September 1990, 0 19 282779 0
Show More
An Elegy for the Galosherman: New and Selected Poems 
by Matt Simpson.
Bloodaxe, 128 pp., £6.95, October 1990, 1 85224 103 9
Show More
Show More
... avoiding paraphrasable meaning altogether. One need only point to the work of Wallace Stevens or John Ashbery to show how successfully some of it sustains our expectations while ultimately refusing to deliver the semantic goods. Having extracted a poem’s point, runs the usual defence of such teasing evasions, readers will have no further use for the poem ...

Bravo, old sport

Christopher Hitchens, 4 April 1991

Critical Crossings: The New York Intellectuals in Post-War America 
by Neil Jumonville.
California, 291 pp., £24.95, January 1991, 0 520 06858 0
Show More
Show More
... the names of Rudolf Slansky, Ehrlich and Alter, Max Schachtman, Andres Nin, Amadeo Bordiga and John Dewey are, still, names with which to puncture an argument, break up a friendship, revise an article or inaugurate a new and daring small magazine. Keywords include ‘Doctors’ Plot’, ‘Deutscherite’, ‘PR Crowd’, ‘Vyshinsky’ and ...