Behind all the distorted coverage, it seems to me, is an exoticising assumption: they’ll never be quite like us, though they deserve extravagant praise for trying. But Saudi Arabia is a country...
From time to time I’ve had the experience of revisiting a novel only to find that a scene which I thought had made a strong impression on me wasn’t there at all, or only passingly,...
In The Dream Colony, a memoir published posthumously in 2017, the gallerist and curator Walter Hopps mentions his first meeting with Andy Warhol, in New York in 1961, when Warhol was a...
By my count, of the 37 photographs of Michael Ovitz in this book there are 19 in which his mouth stays shut – while he’s smiling. That isn’t intended as a hostile remark....
The sculptor Elisabeth Frink had her first London show in 1955. She was 24 and already teaching at St Martin’s College and the Chelsea School of Art. She dated her formation, however,...
We may think all biopics are biofantasies, in which case the opening title card of Adam McKay’s new film Vice will have us laughing already. After all, he is the former Saturday Night...
People talk of painted eyes in portraits that ‘follow you round the room’. T.J. Clark, in the third of the six essays collected in his new book, Heaven on Earth, strangely inverts...
In December 362 ce, Julian the Apostate wrote a short satire on the occasion of the Bacchanalia. It took the form of a commentary whispered to Bacchus by the old satyr Silenus as each former...
There are self-trained artists; then there are self-willed ones. Edward Burne-Jones, like Vincent Van Gogh, was one of the latter. That’s to say, he decided, in 1855, to be an artist...
‘It seems that I have written miles of words,’ the choreographer Martha Graham wrote to the composer Aaron Copland in 1943. ‘But that is the way I work … to make a...
Elizabeth Prettejohn’s book opens with a discussion of The Last of England by Ford Madox Brown, made in 1852-55 and now in Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. The painting shows a couple...
Alfonso Cuarón likes to travel in his films: to outer space in Gravity (2013), to Hogwarts in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004), to a bleak future world in Children of Men...
Otis Redding was born in 1941 on a farm in Terrell County, Georgia, 150 miles south of Atlanta, but raised further north in Macon, a small, bustling city at the geographical centre of the...
For centuries the reputation of Venetian Renaissance painters largely depended on the comments made about them in Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Artists. Vasari was in Venice for several...
There is no reliable single view of a big city building. Take London’s tallest skyscraper, the Shard. Here’s one view: it looks like a blown-up version in glass and steel of Kim...
BBC managers have become a national joke. The problem is structural. Many start out as capable and engaged producers but they can only win promotion by showing ever greater degrees of editorial caution....
I believe that both Mantegna and Bellini were alert to every difficult turn and rebalancing in Luke’s verses, and thought hard as they painted about how to convert such turns into touches, faces,...
When the American artist Bruce Nauman was in graduate school in the mid-1960s, the traditional forms of visual art were in deep trouble. The best new work, the Minimalist Donald Judd had...