George Orwell saw the patriotism of the British working class as an almost unconscious link with the middle and upper classes: ‘Just because patriotism is all but universal and not even the...
I llustrators of the Divine Comedy find it hard to graduate from Hell, easy going for all the arts, to Paradise, which can look dreary by comparison. The Inferno, after all, is of the earth...
‘Confrontation 2’, 1988. I n June 1995, the Museum of Modern Art in New York announced that it had acquired a series of 15 paintings by the German artist Gerhard Richter,...
‘A Billet outside Paris’ (1894) by Anton von Werner That the 19th-century paintings from the Berlin Nationalgalerie should be exhibited at the National Gallery, London (which...
U nmounted and unframed, all the Rembrandt prints in the exhibition at the British Museum and all the drawings from Goya’s private albums at the Hayward Gallery – a few hundred...
It’s 5 a.m. and we are bundled up like Sherpas in our boots and sheepskins, boarding the plane to Utah with a contingent of young New Yorkers with pony tails talking into cellphones and...
The party was a success. Wordsworth was not too much on his dignity, Lamb was not too drunk. The talk was of Milton and Shakespeare, Voltaire and Newton. Lamb and Keats agreed that Newton had ‘destroyed...
Travelling to Paris recently, I was surprised to see advertisements for ‘Joséphine Baker, Music-hall et paillettes’, an exhibition at the Espace Drouot-Montaigne commemorating...
Sketch for ‘Study the Old but Create the New’, c.1919, by Varvara Stepanova. E phemerality shows its sweet sad face when the yellowing edges of books you remember buying, and...
Writing in Haydn Studies of the composer’s reception during the 19th century, Leon Botstein tells an interesting story about Felix Weingartner, Mahler’s successor as conductor at the...
If the balaclava’d guerrilleros of the Animal Liberation Front run short of targets once they’ve seen off the laboratories full of victimised mice, they might consider picketing the...
Caravaggio’s ‘Madonna di Loreto’, c.1604-5. C oming upon the Madonna di Loreto away from its proper home, the Church of Sant’ Agostino, is like finding an old...
Tributaries to the Euston Road, the river of traffic which divides the agreeable banality of Bloomsbury from the wilderness which spreads beyond the train sheds of St Pancras and King’s...
According to the catalogue for the National Gallery exhibition of Rembrandt self-portraits, the artist’s portrayal of himself is ‘unique in art history, not only in its scale and the...
The day he first met Wyndham Lewis, shortly after the end of the First World War, Ernest Hemingway was teaching Ezra Pound how to box. The encounter took place in Paris, where Pound had a studio,...
John Lennon gave his famous interview to Jann Wenner of Rolling Stone magazine at the end of 1970, a few days before the release of the most important solo-Beatle record, John Lennon/Plastic Ono...
L eaving the exhibition of Turner watercolours at the Royal Academy’s Sackler Galleries, I looked down Piccadilly towards the Ritz and Green Park and tried to see the view as Turner might...
Dora Maar’s ‘Sky and Mountain’, undated, but executed in the late 1950s or the 1960s. M ost people, if they think of Dora Maar at all, remember her as the subject of one...