A catalogue preface, whether rhapsodic, investigative, polemical or explicative, is also meant to be a piece of advocacy. This creates a problem over writing a preface about Richard Long. He has...
About ten years ago, an eminent composer of Schoenbergian leanings unblinkingly remarked that modern music, like socialism, democracy and the BBC, might be among the luxuries which the European...
What exactly do we know about Peter Sellers? There have been at least half a dozen biographies before this one, and through them the outline of his career has become pretty familiar. We know that...
There was something unnerving about Bartók, as Agatha Fassett indicates in The Naked Face of Genius, her 1958 ‘novel’ about his American last years. ‘That’s one bit...
Pugin’s first professional commission, in 1827, was to design furniture at Windsor Castle. He was 15. Three years later, already drafting an autobiography, he recalled that the French...
In the summer of 1913, Jacques Copeau, the French stage pioneer, who had just founded his Théâtre du Vieux Colombier in Paris, wrote to Duncan Grant asking him to prepare the costumes...
A cricket ball is a peculiar object. Primitive, volatile, a relic of the game’s origins in a pre-industrial world, its behaviour still baffles physicists. Over the years, bowlers, seeking...
Until not so long ago it seemed Fromentin had got it right in 1876 when he celebrated Dutch art as offering a portrait of a new, free state: ‘un Etat nouveau, un art nouveau’, as he...
When you draw up a list of famous frogs in the history of the planet, it turns out to be pretty short. There’s the one who was only doing time as a frog, and there’s the one who was...
I missed most of the original hoopla in the O.J. Simpson story because I happened to be spending the weekend in a televisionfree zone, as a house-guest in the Connecticut countryside. We all...
The tremors of political unrest that rocked so many universities on both sides of the Atlantic during the late Sixties and early Seventies had important repercussions in many of the humanities...
Travelling in West Africa a little over forty years ago, Basil Davidson was shown around the chamber of the new territorial assembly in Bamako, built by the French as a concession to the growing...
Books, too, have a body language. But does the way they are physically presented impinge in any significant way on the texts they contain? Jerome McGann reckons that the private press movement...
Skill had been killing Formula One. In the early Nineties, Frank Williams and Renault had together been producing cars that were superior to the rest. The superior drivers wanted to be in them....
There is a painting by Guercino of St Luke displaying, with a gesture of triumphant accomplishment, a painting he has just executed of the Madonna and Child. An angel is shown marvelling at the...
George Bush’s proud declaration that by bombing fleeing Iraqi soldiers America had ‘kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all’, was one of the more startling instances from...
The United States has been gripped by a campaign to drive violence from television. Some blame violent images for violent acts; others insist that the images themselves do violence. Senators...
Trees must not be planted at the front of a house or they will keep chi out. (The front door is the entry point for good and bad alike, and is often protected by good luck papers or door gods.) A watercourse...