As Lévi-Strauss might have said, ‘the dead are good to think with.’ But the thoughts they give rise to are seldom as reassuring as one might hope. The dead, and memories of the...
The Big Issue, the magazine sold on the streets by the homeless, is ten years old this month. The next three issues will describe and celebrate its history; the first of these – available...
‘I regret to say that I must interrupt the logical continuity of this article. I have been lunching with some friends in one of the most beautiful houses in a Bloomsbury square, and...
The self-portrait by Gwen John hanging in the National Portrait Gallery was painted in 1899 or 1900. She is dressed in the formal costume of the period: a tight-waisted blouse with leg-of-mutton...
In the piece by David Bell elsewhere in this issue, a number of lines from an 18th-century French poem are quoted fearlessly in the original. At one time, the question of whether or not to...
‘A folk memory of industrial squalor and urban overcrowding persists in the minds of public and planners alike,’ Richard Rogers and Anne Power argue in Cities for a Small Country,...
The first three volumes of The Buildings of England appeared in 1951, the year of the Festival of Britain. The last, Staffordshire, was published in 1974, on the eve of the miners’ strike...
As the train came into Paris the baby in the seat in front stood up and looked back over the seat. I wondered idly why one so often has a firm opinion about the gender of the very young even...
‘I’m really against nudity in movies,’ Julia Roberts said a while ago. ‘When you act with your clothes on, it’s a performance. When you act with your clothes off,...
Work by 18 of the photographers with whom John Pilger has collaborated over the last thirty or forty years is on show in Reporting the World, at the Barbican Gallery until 30 September. The...
For many people, Frank Gehry is not only our master architect but our master artist as well. In the current retrospective which is about to transfer from the Guggenheim in New York to the one in...
In 1644, the Puritan cleric John Shaw journeyed up to Westmorland to instruct the local people, who, he had been told, were sadly lacking in knowledge of the Bible. The need was confirmed when he...
Bloomsbury have sent out the first publicity pack for Kenneth Tynan’s diaries, edited by John Lahr, which are to be published in October. Among the slogans (‘Think Alan Clark meets...
‘The nearest approach to this,’ I said, ‘would be a Vermeer.’ Yes, a Vermeer. For that mysterious artist was trebly gifted – with the vision that perceives the...
Michael Andrews was born in 1928 and died in 1995. He didn’t produce many paintings (although the ones he made tended to be large). In the exhibition at Tate Britain until 17 October the...
On 7 July the Tour de France began in Dunkirk. Lance Armstrong, who won in 1999 and 2000, has called it ‘a contest of purposeless suffering’. Cycling more than two thousand miles...
The 20th century is over but the aesthetic returns are far from counted. Take the case of the novelist and film-maker Oscar Micheaux (1884-1951). The most prolific director of so-called race...
The core repertory of Western classical music is dominated by a small number of composers, mostly German and Austrian, mostly of the 18th and 19th centuries. In their work, perfection – of...