It is sad to know we’ve been robbed of the songs that were to come from John Lennon. He was a master of his craft and made music that was personal and unique. In partnership with Paul...
The short topical review-article is a literary discovery of the last two hundred years or so – the age of mass literacy and the mass-circulation newspaper. A good review column is read by...
We live in a society which has learnt to take trade-unionism for granted. We extend to it the kind of tolerance which we give to the Churches in the name of religious freedom, even when the...
I write this during the world silence which Yoko Ono has asked for in remembrance of her husband, John Lennon, murdered by a crazy fan. I can’t say I’m observing it, but I’m not...
There’s a jet on the cover of Destinations, soaring silently above New York, bathed in the rosy, gauzy haze of a dawn sun. The serenity of it all is deceptive, because Jan Morris is...
A year or so before his death in 1788, Thomas Gainsborough made a series of chalk sketches of ‘a poor smith worn out by labour’. In some of them, the smith appears as a woodman,...
In what her publishers claim to be the first monograph in English on David, Dr Brookner explains that she sees her book as a ‘preparation’ for more specialised studies at present...
S. S. Prawer is Taylor Professor of German Language and Literature at Oxford. Robert Phillip Kolker is Associate Professor of Film Studies (in the Department of Communication Arts and Theatre) at...
The thing arose slowly and let the blanket that covered its head and back fall to the ground. There stood revealed the most disgusting specimen of humanity that I have ever seen. In the course...
Chapter Four of Mary Lutyens’s memoir of her father finds her parents at Scheveningen, on their honeymoon. ‘For the first week they sat back to back on the beach in two of those...
‘The history of architecture,’ wrote A.W.N. Pugin in 1843, ‘is the history of the world.’ To judge from the three books under review, present-day orthodoxy is something...
What is the difference between a satirist and an impressionist? I don’t know – what is the difference between a satirist and an impressionist? The sad little question is properly cast...
Alan Coren is the editor of Punch, and also probably the funniest writer of humorous columns now in regular practice – by no means an inevitable, or even usual, combination. Punch seems to...
‘In this unique fiction,’ say the publishers, ‘word and image meet with a richness scarcely seen since Blake.’ Certainly A Humument is no ordinary novel: but nor is it...
Maria Callas died almost exactly three years ago. Two months later Arianna Stassinopoulos was commissioned to write her biography. She was half-way through when she made the discovery that there...
Why did the most beautiful and adored of early movie queens walk out at the height of her career and become a virtual recluse? Alexander Walker treats Garbo as a mystery to which he at last can...
The machine grinds on and on. The sixth edition of Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians will come out next winter, all 20 volumes, 18,000 pages, 22,500 articles, 7,500...
Britain lost three times as many combatant lives in the 1914 war as in the 1939 and, by the end of 1916, more than in all wars since the Plantaganets. (France lost twice as many as we did in the...