EastEnders is not, or not only, a slice-of-life drama. Like all soap operas, like all operas, it repeatedly oversteps the limit. The idea of ‘digging the dirt’ is given a whole new meaning,...
The demarcated ring on the grassy plateau was from its outset about heaven, in the sense of afterlife. Was it always also about the heavens, in the sense of sky-watching? Can we rediscover how Stonehenge’s...
Children have some of the best lines in Top Gun: Maverick, directed by Joseph Kosinski and following not very hard on the heels of the original, which came out in 1986. When Penny Benjamin...
In July 2007 I drove west from New Haven for eight hours to Getzville, north of Buffalo, to meet Magda Cordell. She was then in her eighties; I wanted to ask her about life as an artist in...
The point of view is that of the operator of a drone or missile locked onto its target, as the dissolves take us from one appointment to another with Schwarzkopfian relish. Still, hurry isn’t the...
Thomas Gainsborough complained that he was ‘sick of portraits’, but he seems, nonetheless, to have valued his fancy pictures – these were the works for which he charged the highest prices....
Carlo Crivelli invites us to think about the nature of art and illusion. Does the trick of painting a fly on a painting serve also to remind us that the painting itself is a work of fiction, or does it...
Roy DeCarava saw things that other people didn’t. He saw beauty in a crushed aluminium can and the light behind a pair of curtains. He could see music, not just hear it. His pictures capture what...
The world Jacques Lartigue took part in and portrayed was one where Zola ran into Colette, where Nana met Gigi. And the names – or rather, the nicknames – are part of its sonic environment. Lartigue...
Yves Saint Laurent’s admirers seemed determined to memorialise him when he was alive and by the end of his career they had largely succeeded. In 1983, he was the first living designer to...
Ryusuke Hamaguchi admits that he worried about his film, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy: ‘I was actually scared that maybe I was writing the same story three times.’ We don’t...
The Sex Pistols, Malcolm McLaren declared, ‘were anti-music and anti-business’, yet ‘God Save the Queen’ outsold Rod Stewart twice over. This was his knack, and his downfall: to...
Suzanne Valadon liked sharp elbows, jutting shoulder blades, knobbly knees and abdominal folds, but her figures are also shaped by her knowledge of the strain of holding a challenging pose. She was once...
On the one hand, the rubbish deployed by Schwitters affronted traditional ideas of artmaking; on the other, its use pointed to a new aesthetic responsive to the ruinous aftermath of the war. To lose this...
With Garbo, the process of distillation out of which stars are made reached a limit so absolute that hardly anything remains by way of ascertainable mortal residue. To describe her life is to attempt...
The Peruvian poet César Vallejo wrote in a famous sonnet that he would die in Paris on a rainy Thursday. He lived in Paris, it rains quite a bit there, especially for poets, and he had...
First Australian culture is testament to 50,000 years of survival – or as many Indigenous intellectuals refer to it (incorporating a sense of political resistance), ‘survivance’. Songlines...
Nico had the detachment of those who’ve survived by stepping outside themselves and a need for control that spiralled into inertia. She enjoined others to help her and most of the time they did....