Two descriptions of pleasure gardens, a novel feature in the cultural life of 18th-century Londoners: Vauxhall it a composition of baubles, overcharged with paltry ornaments, ill conceived, and...
Wilt ‘the Stilt’ Chamberlain, the former American basketball player, has three distinct claims to fame. First, there is the basketball, of which modest art he was, as his nickname...
The composer Lord Berners (1883-1950), as a dozen books of memoirs remind us, was very much a name in the Twenties and Thirties, in the sphere in which fashionable society meets the arts. His...
‘Cities that are beautiful, safe and equitable are within our grasp.’ So says Richard Rogers at the end of this reworking of his Reith Lectures of 1995, and we must do our best to...
‘Martha Gellhorn (1908-98), war correspondent and heroine’. Since her death in February, this epitaph has become a depressing possibility. Now we can say what we like about her, but...
Like Titian’s, Cartier-Bresson’s work began as the mirror of one epoch and is ending as that of another, simply because he invented the best mirror and kept polishing it...
The one line that everybody knows about why people climb mountains was spoken on a wet night in New York, 17 March 1923. The tall, lean and theatrically handsome George Mallory, clergyman’s...
Leading the way in the stock market flotation of clubs is the most profitable, Man United. ‘If you were to make a list of everything that bedevils football and put them in a pile, at the top of...
In February 1987, partly to finance the purchase of a larger house, Kingsley Amis sold his papers (483 catalogued items) to the Huntington Library in Southern California. Amis professed to hate...
When I was at school in the late Forties there were two sorts of painting on the walls. Most classrooms hosted a couple of pictures scarcely above the Highland-cattle level, and in terrible...
The 17th-century antiquary John Selden spent his life deciphering Greek inscriptions and interpreting Near Eastern myths. No scholar of his time had more experience with the historical study of...
Modern artist as con-man: Salvador Dalí. The phoniness of Dalí’s work from the late Thirties until his death in 1989 coincided with the period of his greatest notoriety and...
‘Where are your bodyguards?’ asked my London landlord, peering hopefully over my shoulder as I picked up the keys. It was an early warning of how great a disappointment I would be to...
We all love Bonnard now. In straw polls he is in everyone’s top three. Unexpected people turn out to have been fans: Francis Bacon liked his brushwork. It was not always so. ‘Pierre...
One of the myths that fuzzes the shadowy outline of Ian Penman, a laureate of marginal places, folds in the map, is that Paul Schrader, the director of a sassy remake of Jacques Tourneur’s
A figure as singular as Carstairs assails one’s sensibilities the way the god Pan might were he suddenly to materialise in one’s back garden. One would be tempted to pretend one hadn’t...
‘Do you want to ...’ and sometimes ‘Would you like to ...’ my mother sang, never sure which was right. ‘Do you want to swing on a star? Carry moonbeams home in a...
The evening paper was leading with the police calling in a ‘Cracker-style’ forensic psychologist to help them solve the case. There was a poster with the same headline for the...