Arts & Culture

Songs​ by Sparks (or the Mael brothers) include ‘When You’re a French Director’, ‘Edith Piaf Said It Better Than Me’, ‘Angst in My Pants’, ‘Life...

There are few more exuberantly beautiful spectacles than the Royal Ballet’s dancers in flight. They describe their sense of comradeship, the joy they take in their work, the ideals they share. But...

I reach a familiar impasse. I have no words, or none that strike me as convincing, for the way Aesop looks – the way his features hover between irony and resignation – but that doesn’t...

Afterness, Artangel’s latest installation of new artworks in ‘unexpected places’, opened in June on Orford Ness, a weather-beaten spit of Suffolk shingle a few miles downcoast...

Although Hollywood had a Jewish drama of its own, Jewishness wasn’t openly expressed and Jewish themes were neither the subjects nor the subplots of films. Success couldn’t buy you access to...

Somewhere between handicraft and hobby and associated mostly with women, flower arranging conjures up images of 1950s housewives filling the suburban afternoons or savage competition at the WI. Constance...

‘Despite international rhetoric,’ the  V&A curators claim, ‘Iranian culture, even beyond fine art, travels well.’ They cite the films of Asghar Farhadi and the popularity...

Thinking about people packed together, breathing together underground, brings the dark nights of the Blitz into the present. This world feels foreign, but also familiar. The very idea of shelter, sheltering,...

Ilearned​ only recently, from Charlotte Chandler’s biography, that Bette Davis had taken her first name from a Balzac novel, not knowing, apparently, that the character in question was...

Because the British Museum has artefacts from so many other places the British pillaged and destroyed, and because many more people visit London than Benin City, or even Lagos, it follows that this is...

The Russian state lab in Sochi was the official drug testing facility for the whole games. As head of the lab, Grigory Rodchenkov’s work was overseen by Wada, an organisation in denial about Russian...

Halfway​ through Structures for Life, the Niki de Saint Phalle exhibition at MoMA PS1 (until 6 September), is a letter Saint Phalle wrote to her muse and sometime lover, Clarice Rivers....

‘It is not easy to conceive a more striking object than the Parthenon, though now a mere ruin.’ But the Parthenon is sidelined in one of the views and absent in the other. Instead, centre stage...

Though billed as an optimistic vision of ‘Pan American Unity’, Rivera’s mural has an ominous quality: we can see evidence of imperialism, fascism, the extraction of natural resources....

Afew​ weeks ago, I came across a young poet saying that the book he had been turning to during Covid was Francis Ponge’s Le Parti Pris des choses. (Siding with Things, the translation of...

On London buses, the passengers no longer speak to one another. They speak on their phone, often using a different sort of voice. Most are silent behind their masks. Only the gangs of school kids offer...

Of the very, very many things that make fans cross, nothing makes them crosser than penalties and sendings-off induced by simulation. We all know what it looks like: the faintest contact with a defender...

Moonlight on broken stone tracery is a common motif; dark interiors provide a foil for stained glass and for white satin and deep blue velvet. The men must be away on the crusades. Young women are sobbing...