I am old enough to remember a time when going to the movies meant going to see the newsreels too. Perhaps that is why the juxtaposition of CNN and JFK makes so much sense to me. I’ve never...
Madonna is not a subject for easy writing. She is a commentary on something, but God knows on what.
‘If one thinks of appearances as a frontier, one might say that painters search for messages which cross the frontier: messages which come from the back of the visible. And this, not...
Time can play dirty tricks on architects when launch-time promises are recalled to mock crumbling fabric. The progenitors of much post-war public housing suffered in this way. Time finds out bad...
Kant’s characteristic philosophical strategy – ingenious, original, and by his own assessment, revolutionary – consisted in transferring to the mind, as among its organising...
In the early Eighties an Italian family in North London was successfully prosecuted and fined £100 for putting flowers on a relative’s grave in contravention of cemetery regulations:...
The pale blue, wide-open eyes of Madame Jacques-Louis Leblanc, under their large geometrically-perfect lids, are placed high on the canvas, to the left of its centre, and it seems a great...
It’s unfashionable these days to play Bach on the piano. This, plus the fact that the authentic piano repertoire is Classical and Romantic, makes it easy for us to forget that the piano is...
One of my fondest memories of the two years I spent as Stockhausen’s teaching assistant was observing him direct two unfortunate locals on tall ladders as to the precise positioning of the...
For the inhabitants of Slatinske Doly, a small Ruthenian village on what was then the border between Czechoslovakia and Romania, smuggling was an honoured and necessary trade. This is where...
A few years ago I met Elvis Presley’s Uncle Vester. Cross the road from Graceland, Elvis’s smallish mansion in Memphis, and you enter the large museum-and-souvenirs complex where you...
A year ago, made tame by viral invasion, I wandered listlessly through the arctic wilderness of the Stonebridge Estate in Haggerston, in the company of a strategically-bearded photographer sent...
Correspondents of Western news organisations posted in India usually treat it as a soft assignment. There is much to report by way of colour, exotica and, the staple of all journalists,...
The Warren Commission reported that it found no ‘credible’ or ‘meaningful’ evidence of a conspiracy to assassinate President John Kennedy, and the words are of course a...
A visit to the exhibits at the Tate Gallery short-listed for this year’s Turner Prize shows how professionalism today runs not only artistic theory but art itself. There was nothing to take...
I recently attended a lavish production of Richard Strauss’s opera Salome at the Staatsoper in Vienna. Directed by Boleslav Barlog, sung by the diva Mara Zampieri, and staged, in keeping...
When Shakespeare et la fête appeared in 1988, it was building upon approaches already established in the studies of C.L. Barber, E.K. Chambers and Enid Welsford which related...
Today the Roman Catholic priest celebrating Mass stands on the far side of the altar, facing the congregation, in accordance with the prescription of the Second Vatican Council of 1963. In doing...