Tony Smith, reviewing J.K. Oates’s Penguin on herpes (LRB, Vol. 5, No 9), sounded, thank God, a cheerful rather than a holy note. Far from being a divine visitation on lechery, herpes is a...

All writers know about lunch. A good lunch with one’s publisher is sometimes the only thing that keeps one going on a project threatening to go stale. The worst thing that usually looms...

In Godfrey; A Special Time Remembered Jill Bennett tells how she braved the sacred portals of the Garrick Club to continue a row with her lover Godfrey Tearle, how the old actor came down a...

I have recently read The History Men by John Kenyon. I remember reading a different book, The History Man by Malcolm Bradbury, some years ago. I did not find Bradbury’s book at all funny,...

It depends, I suppose, on what you thought of the film Death in Venice. What does? What you think of Dirk Bogarde’s new book An Orderly Man, Chatto, £8.95. Worth it? When you think of...

The heavenly ruler looked down, noted the inadequacy of Giotto and his successors and decided to dispatch Michelangelo to earth, there to demonstrate perfection in no fewer than four arts...

Plans have been laid, the land is bought and later this year contractors will start to build, at Southwark, on or near the original site, a replica of Shakespeare’s Globe. It’s an...

I first became aware of Professor Mellers when he lectured at Worcester College, Oxford in about 1962. The Beatles hadn’t got into the charts by then, so the theme of his lecture was...

Here, for a start, are some nuggets of the old and the new New Journalism. What do they have in common? By now, 1967, with more than a hundred combat missions behind him, Dowd existed in a...

All the signs, we are continually told, point to rapid economic recovery in the US, and the Stock Market, perhaps because of this iteration, moves almost daily to new record highs. But unofficial...

Both these books are art books in the particular sense that the main reason for paying quite large sums for them would be their illustrations. This is not to say their texts are bad. Both are by...

The Prince and the Wild Geese is a story of 1832 told in words and pictures, the words almost all Brigid Brophy’s, the pictures by Prince Grégoire Gagarin, artist son of the Russian...

Charlatans spread scepticism. Frauds unmasked make critics look fools. When new work looks very simple, and very easy to do, eyes narrow and muttering starts about the emperor’s new...

‘One of the many contradictory qualities of the British,’ James Lees-Milne rightly notes in his attractive if angry anthology in piam memoriam Bladesover, ‘is to revere, and...

The idea of the painter as a power of nature, an organ of creation in himself, has been as deeply-rooted and long-lasting as anything in the Western legend of the artist. Rubens was every kind of...

A friend of mine recently went to see Pisanello’s fresco of St George and the Princess in the Church of Sant’ Anastasia in Verona. She was soon accosted by the sacristan, who was...

Last year, the year of his death, Mario Praz’s An Illustrated History of Interior Decoration was once again made available, after being out of print for a decade. William Weaver’s...

‘Schnabel is the latest American wunderkind, half-Courbet, half-apeman,’ announced Waldemar Januszczak in the Guardian of 29 December 1982. At the Venice Biennale he impressed with...