It rained off and on during the opening week of the Venice Biennale, and the Lithuanian pavilion hadn’t prepared for bad weather. An indoor beach had been set up inside a former military...
In an essay entitled ‘Twenty Minutes from before the War’, Joseph Roth describes how in the 1920s French cinema audiences (and no doubt others elsewhere in Europe) lapped up...
In August 1943, Jean-Pierre Grumbach, a former soldier in the 71st artillery regiment in Fontainebleau, arrived in London. Grumbach, an Alsatian Jew from Paris, 25 years old, wanted to offer...
One evening recently I was in the local supermarket, which always has a surprisingly tasteful collection of old pop and soul hits on its playlist. ‘Raspberry Beret’ came on and I just couldn’t...
Under the Weimar Republic newspapers and magazines flourished as never before in Germany. Contrary to Volker Berghahn’s claim in Journalists between Hitler and Adenauer that the press...
John Lanchester’s piece in this issue first appeared on the LRB blog. You can read it here.
When Count Harry Kessler met Edvard Munch in Berlin early in 1895, Munch was ‘still young’, Kessler wrote, but seemed ‘worn out, tired, and in both a psychic and physical...
‘And the humans,’ a dark deep voice asks at the beginning of the film, ‘what can they do but burn?’ The answer is quite a lot, especially when they are defended by...
If you know anything about Magnus Carlsen, you probably know that he is supposed to be making chess cool. Before he was twenty, he was the subject of two books and a film; in the years since...
The European art academies were first formed in Florence and Rome in the 16th century as professional associations devoted to raising the status of the artist above that of a craftsman,...
Louis-Léopold Boilly’s long life – his career began during the Ancien Régime and lasted until the final years of the July Monarchy – makes it hard not to view his...
On music as on art and culture in general, Fisher’s standards were strict. ‘Music that acknowledged and accelerated what was new’ in the world around it was a force for good, but music...
Towards the end of Blade Runner the actor Rutger Hauer, playing a replicant whose programmed life is fading, says he has ‘seen things you people wouldn’t believe’. ‘All...
Jean Cooke liked painting her sofa. ‘I kept painting that sofa,’ she said. ‘It dominated my life. People came and sat down on it and I painted them.’ In Sofas Galore (
Don McCullin’s retrospective at Tate Britain (until 6 May) is proof that it pays for a photojournalist covering victims of conflict and hardship to get up close: not quite eyeball to...
The Palais de Justice in Brussels is a product of civic and architectural delirium, a Circumlocution Office looming over the historically working-class Marolles district like a sinister,...
The most arresting scene in Beverly, the first book by the American cartoonist Nick Drnaso, arrives midway through a story – one of six – called ‘The Lil’ King’....
Watching Astaire and Rogers films again, especially the classic trio of Top Hat (1935), Swing Time (1936) and Shall We Dance (1937), leaves all kinds of old impressions intact. The air is...