In the early Sixties, when I was ten and first saw Tod Browning’s classic vampire film Dracula (1931) on television, I was impressed that the Count could walk past a mirror and cast no...
This book by its own admission goes for breadth over depth in its consideration of disability in film. Like many a cultural archaeologist coming upon a rich site, Martin Norden does what...
The man from Cork thumbed through my race-card. Borrowing my ballpoint, he put a cross beside Kinard Diamond in the 4.30 and gave me a meaning look. We were standing at a lonely stretch of...
It was in Poland that the ice had started to crack. Early in 1956, at the 20th Party Congress in Moscow, Nikita Khrushchev had coupled his denunciation of Stalin with a promise of reform. The...
In a preliminary chapter called ‘Curriculum Vitae’ David Sylvester explains that he became interested in art when, at 17, he was fascinated by a black and white reproduction of a...
‘AT&T Welcomes the World,’ announced the giant sign above the Global Olympic Village at Olympic Centennial Park. Although international corporations had built the park to call...
Don Bradman did poorly by me in my youth: all I saw of him was his parting Oval duck in 1948, the most untimely nought in the history of cricket. It came on the first day of the fifth and last...
Though we both came to the offices of the New Yorker nearly every day for 15 years, Joseph Mitchell and I were never introduced and we never introduced ourselves. I seldom saw him; mostly he...
Hugh Kenner’s lively Chuck Jones: A Flurry of Drawings belongs to the ‘Portraits of American Genius’ series launched two years ago by the University of California Press with the...
Is there anything stranger than a pop star out of time? Before Elvis Presley, before Michael Jackson, there was Al Jolson – ‘the most popular entertainer of the first half of the 20th...
Lay aside for a moment your self-esteem and imagine that you are Jeffrey Archer. You are now a model citizen of the Post-Modern state of hyper-reality, a figure in whom actuality and invention,...
Degas beyond Impressionism at the National Gallery shows an old man’s work. His eyesight was giving him trouble. His subject-matter had narrowed down to a few themes: women –...
A black-Hispanic graffiti artist, Basquiat acted the outsider with brio. His career opened in 1981; he became famous overnight; and died of an overdose in 1988 at the age of 27. In between, he painted...
Whether the General Election takes place at the end of this year or the beginning of next, the Conservative Party’s campaign will focus on three issues: taxation, crime and Europe. In this...
The screen shows a flat, empty road from a very low angle, a torn tyre lying on it like a piece of junk sculpture. Then the towers of a city in the distance; then a set of ramshackle houses; a...
Star Trek is a phenomenon, no doubt about it. Since 1966 we’ve had the original series, the Next Generation, Deep Space Nine (now in its fourth year) and Voyager (now in its second). There...
There he stands, mounted on a pedestal, booted, spurred and bigger than life, his enormous, holstered six-shooter set just below the eye-level of passers-by, welcoming travellers to Orange...
Some art is distinguishable from non-art only by the kind of attention it gets. In a museum of modern art anything which is not already an item in the collection, from the light bulbs to the...