Arts & Culture

At a time when there was no female equivalent of the gentleman’s club, the Yellow Book offered a congenial literary space in which men and women could joke, flirt and briefly imagine themselves free...

Eisenman produces weird imagery with technical expertise, but she doesn’t trade in the off-kilter strangeness, say, of Neo Rauch, and steers clear of Surrealism or the more extreme apocalyptic atmospherics...

On a personal level, the kinds of thing we laugh at reveal the truth about us as individuals. On a national level, the kinds of thing we laugh at reveal the truth about us as a country. This seems to apply...

It’s​ tempting to think of Past Lives, Celine Song’s haunting (and haunted) first film, as a work in search of a story. In the end, though, it’s exactly the reverse. The story...

Lauren Bacall was young, but she looked and sounded ancient in her wisdom – and she seemed to be teaching Humphrey Bogart how to relax. They fell in love, which was surely real, but it was the show business...

It’s not hard to praise Brown’s ‘bravura brushwork’ and to point out the art-historical precedents and motifs. What’s more difficult is to define her work’s relation to our own carnality, to...

Questions about the kinds of word that were and were not suitable for inclusion were a perennial source of conflict between James Murray and the volunteers who had professional status in a particular field....

Despite the evidence of what the world ‘has done’ to Neel’s sitters, her portraits are never mawkish. She kept something back: wasn’t it more fun, she said, to play hide and seek with her thoughts,...

‘Going online to try to find some simulation of the friendships and communities I missed,’ Klein found instead ‘The Confusion: a torrent of people discussing me and what I’d said and what I’d...

Antiquities remain, with the possible exception of wildlife, the only illicit commodity that transnational criminal gangs can trade on the open market. You can’t buy or sell people, drugs or weapons...

The voice, the face and the gaze, all crucial to our ‘being with others’, are ‘disrupted and distorted’ by chatbots, artificial intelligence, eye tracking, iris scanning, facial coding and all...

Is rugby a participation sport, or an entertainment spectacle? Which should take priority? The newer style of play is making a lot of money for a lot of people, but there is unequivocal evidence that injury...

There is a moral here, if we like this sort of thing, and Petzold would no doubt say we are entitled to our liking. That’s what abeyance is about. Self-absorbed people have to learn about the lives of...

John had a famous younger brother, Augustus John, and a famous older lover, Auguste Rodin. Her pictures are, on the whole, characterised by restraint of tone and technique. There are not very many of...

Society itself is a satirist and a thief; what it steals is the person you are. James Gillray’s mischief was of an unusual sort, at once refined and coarse, and sometimes with an opacity hard to penetrate...

Although Adam Elsheimer provided miniatures for private and privileged delectation, his work enjoyed an enormous influence, partly because of his close association with a great engraver, Hendrick Goudt,...

The main objection to Georges Seurat’s Nude with Blonde Hair – what makes it ‘one of the most puzzling works in the collection’ – is its ‘poor quality’. But the argument that it isn’t by...

Deciding what to show at Wiels, Chaimowicz wrote to the curator, Zoë Gray: ‘I would like to send you my sitting room.’ The result is a theatrical approximation of The Hayes Court Sitting Room, an...