In the National Gallery you can look into a dark and very ancient stone chamber where there is a teenage girl of exquisite beauty, wearing white satin and kneeling upon a velvet cushion,...
One evening last September, millions of viewers watched three young men forge a Modigliani sculpture live on Italian television. Three things distinguished the programme from other forgers’...
Readers who had encountered its first volume would have known that Stephen Koss’s work on the British political press was monumental. Now it has become his monument in another, brutally...
In Sartre’s Les Mots, there is a mise-en-abîme in which he writes of his youthful fascination with a volume on the childhood of illustrious men: in each life-history – as here in...
The Sloane Ranger style, Peter York has told us, reflects ‘a state of mind that’s eternal’. This may be putting it a bit strongly: but the Sloane ancestry goes back at least to...
There are three Vogues, published in New York, London and Paris. They are known to Condé Nast people as ‘Vogue’, ‘Brogue’ and ‘Frog’. Their characters...
We already know the story. A lad from Liverpool seized black rhythm and blues and transformed it. The sound that white America found too funky for its clean earlobes was re-synthesised by the...
The first televising of the House of Lords, on 23 January was, I found, a pleasant shock. It might well be that the other viewers consisted entirely of the unemployed, but I doubt if even the...
Anyone browsing through the Sunday papers the other week would have noticed in one tabloid a large photograph, candidly snapped, no doubt with a lens like a drainpipe, and captioned ‘the...
The Arts Council is weeding its garden. It is taking steps, as many institutions have had to do over the last few years, to effect economies and redundancies. Operas, orchestras, spectacles for...
These are some extracts from a diary I kept in 1978 while rehearsing and filming a series of six plays for London Weekend Television. Some of the plays were shot on film, some in the studio. If I...
At certain moments, which, given there is less and less time to think, may be fleeting, one question surely crosses the mind of most adult readers: do we actually need to hear from professors? Do...
The almost universal extra-professional unpopularity of architects (what other Royal Institution could the Prince of Wales put the boot into with such sure expectation of applause?) is no new...
The longevity of artists creates special difficulties for their critics. Ideally, from a critical point of view, artists ought to follow Keats’s example and die young, leaving behind a tidy...
The study of English political history has suffered a grievous loss with the death of Stephen Koss in New York on 25 October last. Though only 44, hardly more than half my age, Stephen had...
For all the obvious pleasures offered by Dutch art of the Golden Age, it is remarkable how much puzzlement and antagonism it has aroused. Even as it was being made and marketed, commentators...
Years ago, when I was serving as an anonymous hack on the Times Literary Supplement, one of my duties was to pen sprightly paragraphs for a weekly books column. The idea was to mop up...
The startling claim of Leo Steinberg’s new book is that over the past four centuries the real meaning of much of the religious art of the Renaissance has been lost. He argues that in...