Boy, has Todd Porterfield got it in for the French! According to The Allure of Empire, French artists and writers in the early 19th century threw themselves eagerly into the service of...
Five years ago a man sat in meditation for a couple of hours in a stinking public latrine outside Beijing, his naked body smeared with honey to attract the flies. Now a photograph of the event...
My worthiest ancestor, who in 1780 saved London from desolation – as I like to think – by ordering his redcoat militia to fire on the mob in the Gordon Riots, had another claim to...
Ferteze Nimari had lost two of her brothers and her husband was forced to bury all the dead in one grave. Later, packed into a stifling bus with sixty fellow Kosovars, the couple held onto each...
If you wanted to make your way as a literary journalist in the days of Addison you might have done well to begin by heading for Button’s coffeehouse in Russell Street where the great man...
The first literary appearance of the mythical figure of Prometheus (whose name means ‘foresight’) is in the writings of Hesiod. Hesiod’s Titan is something of a trickster, of...
At the turn of the century, San Giovanni Rotondo was a tiny village in the rugged Gargano mountains of Puglia, the province which forms the heel and spur of the Italian boot. Even forty years ago...
Panic on the peninsula. Outrage in North Greenwich. The gas-holder, familiar to motorists skirting the perimeter fence of what is now the site of The Millennium Experience, set ablaze. Flames...
Radio 1 used to sound like Surrey to me. Perhaps it was the disc jockeys they used in those days, with their creamy car-dealer’s voices and their discreetly tabloid opinions; or the on-air...
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...