In his biography of the painter Chaïm Soutine, Monroe Wheeler tells the story of Soutine’s obsession with Rembrandt’s Woman Bathing of 1654, which shows his wife, Hendrickje...
The great detective never rests, and perhaps doesn’t want to, although in Kenneth Branagh’s new film he does express a wish for a day or two off. No such luck, of course, something...
I have been trying to forget the shows in London commemorating the Bolsheviks, in particular the Royal Academy’s Revolution: Russian Art 1917-32. But I haven’t been able to: some things,...
There are two portraits Roger Fenton took of himself, separated by only a year, one of them in the exhibition of his photographs of the Crimean War at the Queen’s Gallery in Edinburgh...
In 1850 the government announced yet another delay to the construction of the new Houses of Parliament. ‘I am in a towering rage,’ Charles Barry, the architect of the new building,...
On the way into the Rachel Whiteread retrospective at Tate Britain (until 21 January), in the long Duveen Galleries, you come across one hundred translucent coloured blocks, squatting on the...
A big part of a producer’s job is getting people to do things they don’t want to do. I thought about this when the open secret about Harvey Weinstein and his treatment of...
The Compleat Drawing-Book, published by Fleet Street printseller Robert Sayer in 1755, is a handbook for the amateur artist that aims to provide ‘Proper Instructions to Youth for their...
It’s 35 years since Blade Runner was released, and we are now very close to 2019, its once futuristic setting. In this framework the sequel seems a bit overdue, and the time of the...
Herodotus tells us that when Darius’ Persian army invaded Scythia, in the late sixth century bce, the Scythians ran away. The Persians followed them over the steppeland north of the...
In a 1932 article for the Daily Herald entitled ‘What It Feels Like to Be an Enemy’, Wyndham Lewis described his morning routine. After a breakfast of ‘a little raw meat, a...
Last month in an open letter, the editor of China Quarterly, Tim Pringle, reported that more than three hundred articles deemed ‘sensitive’ by the Chinese censors had been blocked...
The centrepiece of the Fahrelnissa Zeid show at Tate Modern (until 8 October) is My Hell, a vast canvas – five metres across and two metres high – of swirling curves and broken...
Most days I eat my lunch sitting under the statue of Charles James Fox in Bloomsbury Square. There are broad steps on each side of the statue, their Portland stone now stained an aqueous...
James Joyce resented the Second World War for distracting readers from the newly published Finnegans Wake, and what with one thing and another I’ve sometimes felt the same way, on behalf...
Once, every American knew the outline and the stock images of that chronicle. Because of largely unhindered television news coverage and the cameras that soldiers carried with them, this was the most...
Kathryn Bigelow’s impressive new film, Detroit, is full of disturbing violence, but its most disturbing moment is entirely non-violent. It comes too late in the film to help in any way,...
On 28 April 1870, Miss Stella Boulton and Mrs Fanny Graham attended the Strand Theatre in London, where they made a spectacle of themselves, catcalling from their box to various men below. As...