The magic lantern is a prosaic object: a tin or wooden box, fitted with a chimney, a set of lenses and a light source. But for nearly four centuries it has animated the walls of homes and theatres, first...
In the years before mass car ownership, Birmingham’s suburban workers were wholly reliant on the bus network. The landscape was denuded of the pubs, music halls and community life that defined the inner...
At the beginning we hear voices, part of a stand-up routine perhaps – later we learn that they’re from a television show. One of them says: ‘You’d think a man who could...
Unlike Eve, who was made from a spare rib, Lilith was made from the same clay as Adam. In Eden, Adam insisted that Lilith lie beneath him during sexual intercourse as an admission of her inferiority. She...
People don’t just leave the house in Andrea Arnold’s films. They set off, door slammed, shoving stuff into a bag, shooing children ahead of them, down the road, across a strip of urban scrubland, headed...
Ivor Gurney has had to wait almost a century for a biographer willing to recognise the curious order that can emerge from psychological disorder, the sounds composed by the unsound mind.
The song we hear at the beginning of David Leitch’s film Bullet Train is the Bee Gees’ ‘Stayin’ Alive’. It’s a good song and all too relevant, but by...
The most bizarre aspect of the ‘quotation’ as we now understand it is that words uttered by King Lear when he’s mad are ascribed to Shakespeare, and that words attributed with some irony to a character...
‘The laws of the colours are unutterably beautiful, just because they are not accidental,’ Van Gogh wrote to his brother, Theo. ‘One can speak poetry just by arranging colours well.’ Van Gogh’s...
Barcelona’s Champions League semi-final at the Camp Nou stadium this spring was watched by a crowd of more than ninety thousand, and some of the games in this Euros have had viewing figures a hundred...
Nietzsche referred to Wagner as the ‘Orpheus of all secret misery’, able to illuminate psychological states through the smallest glance, gesture or turn of phrasing. The composer whose name has become...
It was going to be a roof-raising, hello God hoedown, a complete riot of personal faith, the sentences glinting with rhinestones and Southern Gothic, all of it secured by a narrative raised on sweet tea...
If her work has been admired, it has sometimes come at a cost to her philosophy. Ruth Asawa’s statements about the therapeutic nature of art-making are usually glossed over by curators, as is the proximity...
The boomerang that hit Documenta Fifteen had a secondary trajectory: having travelled across continents and generations, European antisemitism had returned home in the altered guise of an anti-colonial...
Edvard Munch seems especially concerned with beginnings and endings. This awareness isolated him. He couldn’t live in the present because it was always overshadowed by the past or by the future. He found...
Xavier Giannoli’s Illusions perdues won a raft of César awards this year, including for best film, best cinematography and best adaptation. This success seems like something of a...
Basketball players are larger than life – the average NBA player is six and a half feet tall. Going to a game is like entering an episode of Star Trek in which the Enterprise has landed on a planet that...
Charles Ray’s sculptures seem to capture the moment before our perception fixes, before we recognise a form for what it represents: a torso, a body, a woman or man. This is what looking at sculpture...