Everyone who knew G.K. Chesterton loved him for his kindliness and jollity, as well as the dazzling turns of phrase and the forensic psychology of the Father Brown stories. Chesterton adapted his detective’s...
The death early in 1603 of Maria of Austria, daughter of Charles V, wife of Maximilian II and mother of Rudolf II, called for extravagant exequies. Her catafalque, erected in the monastery of...
Fashion magazines were supposed to be aspirational, concerned not with reality but a dream. And the dream echoed the culture, which meant that for most of the 20th century it was deemed best to be rich,...
Among the shadows and gleaming surfaces are the workers, concentrating fixedly. There are no types or archetypes in Chris Killip’s photographs, only the singular iteration of faces and bodies.
The pictures suggest a before and after: the subjects are on their way somewhere. Their clothes tell us something about trends – which continued to be imported as well as self-generated –...
T.J. Clark’s definition of modernism draws on an old-school idea of modernity: Max Weber on ‘the disenchantment’ of a rationalised world, Georg Simmel on the ‘indifference’...
When the Daily Mail launched in 1896 it boasted that, unlike its rivals, it did not carry a page of verbatim parliamentary reports. Instead, there were women’s pages, daily features, and ‘talking...
The unlived life is a great modern theme. Not reality’s disappointments, but reality itself as a form of evasion, the wrong road taken. When we read or hear the word ‘living’,...
There is no way to offset the fact that a gigantic dose of hydrocarbon wealth is being used to stage an immensely carbon-intensive spectacle, in a place that is already getting hotter faster than almost...
Carolee Schneemann worked at a remove from the central debates of 20th-century feminism – making sex films twenty years before the sex wars, kissing cats before the turn to the non-human –...
Florine Stettheimer invited and deflected her categorisation as a woman artist by painting stereotypically feminine subjects with a cutting wit. Satires of beauty pageants, department store sales, bathhouses...
We live in a world, as Stuart Hall put it, in which one can be just as ‘committed’ a revolutionary as Marx or Lenin, but ‘every now and then – Saturday mornings, perhaps, just...
The plot summaries for Park Chan-wook’s Decision to Leave refer to a man being found dead at the foot of a mountain. This is correct, but it isn’t quite what it looks like on...
Frank O’Hara wasn’t a poet to write about parents, siblings and a middle-class Irish-Catholic upbringing in Grafton, Massachusetts, or his military service in the Pacific during the Second...
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...
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....