The Royal Academy’s exhibition of ‘American Art in the 20th Century’ at Burlington House and the Saatchi Gallery is a honeymoon with a marvellous girl who has been stitched into...
In October 1991 Moby baffled Top of the Pops with a performance of ‘Go’, a dance record – a techno dance record – and solo composition by Richard ‘Moby’ Hall,...
‘I must unbend sometimes,’ Hazlitt told his readers in 1821: I must occasionally lie fallow. The kind of conversation that I affect most is what sort of a day it is, and whether it...
Current films are full of regrets and second chances, none more so than the recent work of Clint Eastwood. In the Line of Fire, which opened last month, has him playing an American Secret Service...
‘All conditioned things decay’, was, as roughly translated, the Buddha’s penultimate sentence. ‘The one who has woken’ (which is what the participle buddha means)...
Around 1421 Marin Contarini – a member of one of the ruling Venetian families – began building a house on a site across the Grand Canal from the Rialto. This new palace replaced...
One of the problems of working for BBC World Service programmes like Newshour is that no one in Britain listens to them. That’s not strictly true. If you broadcast at night you discover that there...
Exactly a hundred years ago, Aby Warburg took a short walk on what proved to be a long pier. In his doctoral dissertation on Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus and Spring, he used fewer...
There is nothing like the threatened demise of a newspaper to bring out a journalist’s sentimentality. The disclosure, some weeks ago, that the 201-year-old Observer was to be sold, and...
The best thing I ever did in my professional life was to move from the Daily Express to the Guardian just before the 1964 General Election, and then to stay there. It seemed a good idea at the...
David Gower was this year’s most popular victim, the English underdog, the handsome knight sacrificed by knaves. But good news is at hand: the hero has announced a brilliant season full of...
The most baffling part of the climb was getting to the base of the Rock. Or so we thought until we embarked on the Face itself. On a Saturday we started to ask our way along the limpet-horde of...
I have always thought of Richard Wollheim as embodying the values and interests of a particularly urbane kind of British intellectual, typified by and possibly originating with the members of the...
It’s 3 p.m. on Wednesday, 31 March. Instead of writing this I could/should be watching England’s World Cup game with Turkey live on my public service BBC TV. As it is, I will have to...
The blurb says that Eunice Lipton is ‘a distinguished art historian’, but don’t be misled by that or by the alluring reproduction of Manet’s Olympia (head and neck only)...
In her essay ‘Good Boys and Dead Girls’ Mary Gordon identifies the ‘American innocent’. She tracks him – young, restless and bad news for women – through the...
The visual arts today have two publics. One consists of people who visit, and revisit, churches, cathedrals, museums and galleries – as well as temporary loan exhibitions. The second...
In a notebook entry written during the summer of 1743, the English engraver George Vertue paid tribute to his friend the ‘ingenious’ William Taverner, who ‘besides his practice...