Dianne Sachko Macleod’s Art and the Victorian Middle Class opens up a new world: it answers some questions that have hitherto been asked in vain and others which we may not have thought of...
In 1983 the magazine October devoted an entire issue to a remarkable study of genital display in some – indeed in a great many – Renaissance depictions of Christ. Publication in...
Why are we being compelled to think about how male pianists speak? King Vidor’s A Song to Remember (1945) exerted no such pressure. Nor did Max Ophuls’s Letter from an Unknown Woman...
Subtitled ‘On Order in Architecture’, Joseph Rykwert’s exploration of the classical Orders, and their meaning for the many architects who have made use of them, has the shape,...
Nearly forgotten today, Ernest Meissonier was the darling of the French Salon public during much of the 19th century. People flocked to see his meticulously executed, almost photographically...
The world according to Robert Kaplan has arrived in Britain. The Ends of the Earth is a piece of blockbuster journalism by an American reporter/traveller of some influence whose thinking has...
The subtitle is a promise: ‘Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family’. It promises mystery and its unravelling, and delivers a new literary genre: a steamy bouillabaisse with...
I must have been quite young the first time I saw Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon at the Museum of Modern Art, barely into my teens. I knew little about Cubism, less about Iberian...
A man has been mistaken for somebody else. He has been kidnapped, forced to drink a bottle of bourbon and sent off to meet his death in a stolen car. He survives, and decides it is time to get...
Nothing became her life like the remaking of it, but there were so many remakes. The latest stars Madonna, but the earliest starred Eva María Duarte herself. Or was that María Eva...
Claire Bloom has now written two books about her life. Lest this give rise to any suspicion of autobiographical surfeit, she notes in the Preface to the latest volume, that her earlier book,
If a serious radio channel is a success it can define the state of a culture. Looking back over old copies of the Radio Times, one realises with a keen nostalgia the extent to which the national...
From 1910 to the end of the Fifties, Westerns accounted for a quarter of all Hollywood productions. As late as 1972, the high point of genre revisionism, they still represented 12 per cent of all...
At the age of 23, never having seen a snooker table before, I picked up a cue and started practising for the Women’s World Championship. Five years later, ranked 24th in the world, I was...
In the 1640s, every musical household in Italy had a copy of ‘Ariadne’s Lament’, high-spot of Monteverdi’s Arianna and his most famous song. The lament expressed the...
Sitting in France writing about death and wallpaper, it is no surprise to find my walls orange: ‘that most morbid and irritating of colours’, as Huysmans described it, ‘with its acid...
In early 1983, Rupert Murdoch, Britain’s most powerful newspaper proprietor, offered the editorship of the Sunday Times to the crusted royalty-worshipper and Tory, Alastair Burnet. Burnet...
Whatever you thought of it at the time, the fate of Tel Quel – the journal, the group and the theoretical orientation – concerns us all in one way or another, for the fate of the...