Have you read Glen Matlock’s I was a teenage Sex Pistol? In its own way this is an enlightening book and I like the manner in which the words appear, splattered in a typeface that’s...
There are really only two things people want to keep from public scrutiny: their real, private self; or the fact that they have no private self of any particular interest. Now, my instinctive...
Each day, hundreds of people visit the world’s finest collection of Italian Renaissance sculpture in the Victoria and Albert Museum, but thousands come to see the superb, though less...
Karl Miller’s decision to resign from the London Review of Books is a sad moment for the magazine which, with Mary-Kay Wilmers and Susannah Clapp, he founded in 1979. In all important...
Mordecai Vanunu is starting his seventh year in solitary confinement in an Israeli jail. He is convicted of treason and espionage and his sentence is 18 years. The few members of his family who...
Kwabena Nketia tells us, in his book African Music, that ‘music’ is defined in Africa through the social uses to which it is put. Some native African languages don’t have a word...
The jacket photo for Kafka’s Clothes shows him without any, sitting tailor-fashion on a beach, smiling above naked shoulders and a thin chest, the prominent ears rhyming with prominent...
Like a slender white ocean liner slipping beneath the waves, the most elegant international cricketing career of this or perhaps any generation was finally scuppered at Lord’s on 7...
The death of Martha Graham on 1 April 1991, a little more than a month before her 97th birthday, finally permitted Agnes DeMille to publish her biography of the dancer, after nearly twenty-five...
With that perceptive but strangely innocent eye which has served him so well as a columnist, Sir Peregrine Worsthorne recently expressed shock and astonishment that an editor of the London
Housman liked athletic records of all sorts and seeing them ‘cut’, or broken, although he does not himself seem to have been much of a swimming man. In the verses on Hero and Leander...
A good piece of writing on film, produced by a major literary figure, is as rare as a successful film adaptation of a major literary work. The fear and condescension felt towards the medium by...
‘In the simple mechanic movements of address, the foot takes the second position, the other the third, then the body gently falls forward, keeping the head in direct line with the body. The...
There used to be a notion that the 19th century abandoned the ancient world as a cultural model, and looked instead either to progressive scientific materialism or escapist Gothic Medievalism....
Inspired by the bourgeois ‘bad taste’ of Magritte’s house in the Rue des Mimosas in suburban Brussels, Jonathan Miller took off into one of his self-intoxicating fantasies. We...
Future historians looking back at the Rodney King insurrection in South Central Los Angeles will not see (or not just see) another in the line of racial explosions which go back through Watts,...
The funicular railway takes you to the top of the mountain with the strange name: a nonsense word, a child’s burble, Tibidabo. You see the city of Barcelona spread out beneath you; beyond...
Fred Zinnemann’s movie, From Here to Eternity, came out in 1953. I saw it in 1955, when I was a conscript soldier in Hong Kong. Since it was a story about a peace-time army in an exotic...