When one opens a diary there are two things one wants to know. The first is the date of the entries; the second is the age of the author. James Lees-Milne was 36, rising 37, when he started this...
This book is about the career of John Soane up to the age of 31. As Soane only started to build when he was 28, as all his important work was done after he was 35, as he practised architecture...
Here is a story with a warning. For years past, as I drove from King’s Cross to the Angel, I have noticed St James’s Church, Pentonville, at the top of the hill and have promised...
John Sutherland has produced ‘a calendar following a series of events (mostly trials) from 1960 to the present day’, which deals briefly and brightly with obscenity cases from Lady...
While Syberberg was making this film, over three thousand West German schoolchildren were asked to write an essay on the subject ‘What I have heard about Adolf Hitler’. The wording...
On balance, we should be grateful to the BBC for finding room on its snooker station, over ten successive Sundays, for what the editor of Opera described as France’s long-delayed revenge...
This book, let me say at once, is a masterpiece. It is also, I must quickly add, decidedly eccentric, offering the reader none of the landmarks, none of the orientation, that chapter divisions...
A modest degree of influence was apparently not enough for many barons. Horace Greeley ran for President, Randolph Hearst ran for Governor. Northcliffe ran for Parliament: Cecil King simply wanted to...
Giovanni Battista Meneghini died exactly two years ago aged 85. He had been a deserted husband for 12 years and a widower for four. With the help of Enzo Allegri, a journalist on the staff of the...
Confessions of an Actor is, unsurprisingly, more an impersonation than a real piece of writing. In it, Laurence Olivier acts writing – an uneasy mixture of the chatty (‘All right, I...
Certain to become the most financially successful film in the history of the cinema, the fifth great money-spinner – after Jaws, Close Encounters, Raiders of the Lost Ark and Poltergeist...
The husband-and-wife team of Hans Keller and Milein Cosman looks at Stravinsky in his later years from two very different points of view: on the one hand, that of the rational music critic and...
The reader of this scrupulously-edited volume will look in vain for the source of the most famous critical observation attributed to Weber – made apropos of Beethoven’s Seventh...
Film buffs, a new mutant breed that can see only in the dark and that arranges unlike things in even rows of bestness, have collared the word ‘pantheon’. They have in mind –...
My fairly extensive – and, analytically, intensive – writings about Stravinsky confine themselves to his music and the psychology of his creativity – to the products and the...
The year Strauss was born, 1864, saw the publication of Robert Browning’s Dramatis Personae. The author of Andrea del Sarto would have found in Richard Strauss a subject ideally suited to...
In Abel Gance’s film Napoleon there is a brilliant sequence in the Revolutionary Bureau of Indictments. The walls are stacked to the ceiling with the files of known, suspected, possible and...
‘It’s a speaking likeness.’ For centuries these words carried nothing but praise, but today, if used by the sophisticated, would suggest that some artistic quality was lacking....