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...
Alberto Giacometti (b.1901) had his first postwar show in France at the Galerie Maeght in Paris in 1951. From 1941 to 1945, he had been stranded in his native Switzerland, working on tiny...
Patrick Eagar made his career taking photographs of cricketers, though when he started out in London more than fifty years ago his subjects were mainly party people. In 1966, he took a picture...
Picasso was a painter of themes. Themes, not subjects or ‘subject matter’: he pointed out the difference to André Malraux in 1937, just before Guernica left his studio for...
Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk is worth watching for its final sequence alone. The three stories being told throughout the film intersect rapidly, and no easy solution or reflection...
In the course of a year beginning in late 2013, I found myself at five separate places called the Meeting of the Waters. The first was the confluence of the Greta and the Tees on the Rokeby...
Within a generation of Raphael’s death in 1520 it was widely recognised that his career, along with those of Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, marked a turning point in the development...
The huge canvases Gillian Ayres painted during the 1980s rush at you like Atlantic breakers. Bursts of orange, viridian, scarlet, yellow and cyan tumble forward and engulf you; convulsions of...
I knew very little about Víctor Barrio before, slightly hungover, I was asked by BBC World News on the morning of 10 July last year to comment on his televised death. It was the...
Towards the end of Zack Snyder’s Batman v. Superman (2016), when the two heroes have finished their petulant squabbling and bouts of throwing each other off high buildings, they are...
According to its account of itself, the New Hall Art Collection at Murray Edwards College in Cambridge is the ‘most significant’ collection of modern women’s art in Europe....
Visitors arrive in throngs at the National Palace Museum in Taipei from mainland China, queuing up to see the extraordinary collection of Chinese art: bronze, jade and ceramics, as well as...