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...
T he 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...
I t’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...
H erodotus 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...
I n 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...
L ast 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...
T he 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...
M ost 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...
J ames 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...
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...
K athryn 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,...
O n 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...
A lberto 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...
P atrick 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...
P icasso 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...
C hristopher 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...
I n 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...
W ithin 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...