In 1886 there was an exhibition at the Grosvenor Gallery of the work of John Everett Millais (Sir John, in fact: he had recently been made a baronet). There were pictures from his Pre-Raphaelite...
Nearly 29 million people watched Morecambe and Wise’s Christmas Special in 1977 – over six and a half million more than had watched the Queen’s Speech earlier in the day. Graham...
Mary Cassatt’s Lady at the Tea Table (1883-85) establishes her as one of the outstanding American painters of the 19th century. Indeed, it is one of the most remarkable portraits, American...
‘I do not believe it is yet realised what an important thing has happened,’ Maynard Keynes announced in a BBC broadcast soon after the foundation of the Arts Council in 1946....
Stanley Kubrick’s second film, an RKO short that he made when he was 23, was called Flying Padre. It was about the Rev. Fred Stadtmueller, who flew around New Mexico tending his...
We have been in Hamburg for four months now, living above the shop – in the attic of the Warburg-Haus, where I am the visiting professor for Wintersemester 1998-99. This is the original...
In New York the Museum of Modern Art’s Pollock exhibition was thrilling in the manner of a saga. With exhilarating force it told the incident-packed story of an inspired and inspiring...
All over the world, postgraduate students of English who might once have written on Wordsworth or Mrs Gaskell are now turning out theses on vampires, monsters, sado-masochism and mutilation. Most...
When I tell people that I’m working in Houston for four months, those who’ve been there say: ‘My God! The drive from the airport!’ They mean the drive from George Bush...
Most great Old Master paintings have been sold several times at public auction over the last three centuries, many have been sold more frequently and only a few have escaped auction altogether,...
The exhibition at the National Gallery of Ingres’s portraits is both lavish and comprehensive. It also insists that you come to a conclusion about him. To be offered something as complete...
The major contribution of the English theatre to last year’s Brecht centenary was Lee Hall’s dazzling version of Mr Puntila and His Man Matti, presented by the Right Size, a touring...
One of the best of the many puns in this book is the gloss of ‘dinosaurus’ as ‘Dinos’R’ Us’, a take-off on the ‘Toys’R’Us’ logo that...
Like Diogenes in his tub, Roger Scruton has stripped himself of his professorship of aesthetics to rail, ungowned, against the age in which fate has deposited him. Scruton’s opposition to...
An artist who becomes an adjective is difficult for the biographer. The Hogarthian world of teeming streets, lubricious drawing-rooms and earthy taverns has been softened by censorship and...
Harvard, murder. How much more intriguing that sounds than, say, Harlem, murder. When the story broke, in spring 1995, Melanie Thernstrom was assigned to cover it for the New Yorker. She had...
Anne and I step aside from the slow-motion procession of tourists walking among the market stalls of Florence in the roasting sunshine and enter the Baptistery, a compact octagonal church with...
Early in 1914 Jean Sibelius visited Berlin and went to hear Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet, in which an added soprano sings of ‘air from other planets’ as the music moves...