‘I’ve been told that nobody sings the word “hunger” like I do. Or the word “love”,’ Billie Holiday says in her memoir Lady Sings the Blues (written in...
The first feature-length film by RaMell Ross, Hale County This Morning, This Evening, has been praised for creating a new genre within the documentary form and evoking with unusual clarity the...
Anni Albers joined the Bauhaus in 1922, four years after the end of the First World War. ‘Outside was the world I came from, a tangle of hopelessness, of undirected energy, of...
Between them France and Britain had more than 450 million imperial subjects at the start of World War One. Germany, despite the geographical size of its African acquisitions, had fewer than 20...
The internet hasn’t so much changed people’s relationship to news as altered their self-awareness in the act of reading it. Before, we were isolated recipients of the news; now, we are self-consciously...
The Swiss artist Sophie Taeuber grew up without a father. Carl Emil Taeuber, a pharmacist, succumbed to tuberculosis in 1891, two years after her birth. Her mother, another Sophie, never...
For all Félix Nadar’s gifts with the camera, his interests constantly flitted elsewhere. He was, in the words of his friend Jules Verne, ‘enamoured of the impossible’.
In May 1976, two families of Asian immigrants from Malawi – UK passport-holders – were put up in a hotel while social workers decided what to do with their children. The Sun ran it...
Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot, now showing in a new print at the BFI, was based on a German film called Fanfares of Love, first made in French in 1935 and then remade in 1951....
On 18 October 2010 my father, Peter Campbell, was diagnosed with the cancer of which he would die exactly one year and one week later. I do not know precisely how he lived with the knowledge...
Eve Polastri works for MI5, organising police protection for high-profile foreign visitors. She’s bored, though she doesn’t entirely know it. The girlfriend of Victor Kedrin, a...
The story is waiting for us, asking us to read it, and reread it, even if it was initially supposed to disappear into the machinery of movie-making, like Harry Lime slipping off into the sewers of Vienna.
A small boy, four years old, ‘parading around’ in his sister’s ‘prettiest dress’, blissfully happy, until: ‘My mother beat the hell out of me, and...
The photographer Sanlé Sory was born in the 1940s in French West Africa. At independence in 1960 he became a ‘Voltaic’, or a citizen of Haute Volta, and in 1984, a...
The primary task, I feel, is to create a piece of art that is better than the same amount of silence.
The story is old and always violent, and in a favourite modern version acquires a dark particular twist. The king must die but he also has to collude with, even create his assassin. Early on...
How should a visual artist respond to a culture in which the vast majority of images are produced by machines for other machines, with humans left out of the loop? This technological turn...
Presumably the British Museum doesn’t have a giant inflatable banana in its collections or it would have been included in I Object: Ian Hislop’s Search for Dissent (until 20...