The most recent of William Kentridge’s works on display in Thick Time at the Whitechapel Gallery (until 15 January) is called Right into Her Arms. It’s also one of the best. A...
I once found a copy of Jilly Cooper’s Class (1979) in the bargain box outside a friend’s second-hand bookshop. When I asked how much it was he winced visibly and said:...
The 21st-century version of Aristotle’s Poetics – and for that matter of Cicero’s On the Orator, Robert McKee’s Story, Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand...
Over the years, travelling to Birmingham from time to time, I’ve noticed a handsome classical building, a kind of mirage that comes into view briefly as the train approaches New Street...
You can shut down the iconographical interpretation of art, with its artistic and literary allusions, and concentrate instead on Turner’s painterliness, but with Rain, Steam and Speed you might be...
Good humour comes to seem relentless if it isn’t interrupted once in a while, and this is one of the interesting effects of the film De Palma, a feature-length account of the...
During the 1870s, the decade he turned fifty, Frederick Law Olmsted, the creative mastermind of New York’s Central Park, looked back on his career as a landscape architect, the compound...
At Chinggis Khaan International Airport a driver and minder were waiting. We climbed into an old Nissan saloon and set off across Ulaanbaatar for a settlement in the south-east of Mongolia,...
Being an agent isn’t a job, it’s a lifestyle, and the people who are really good at it are having a wonderful life, though none of them is going to heaven.
Could anything be more unexpected, in the world of art criticism, than the appearance of a book by Rosalind Krauss on Willem de Kooning? Krauss is a wide-ranging critic and historian of...
‘Jai vu une robe charmante, faite de bouchons de liège,’ said Apollinaire. He can’t have been walking through Mayfair, where the autumn fashions have just been...
Who was the most important 19th-century composer? Naturally, it depends on what’s meant by important: Beethoven overshadows them all, but Wagner generated more discussion, and more...
The first thing Estrella remembers being told about her father, in Victor Erice’s shadowy masterpiece The South, is that before she was born he predicted her sex and gave her a name....
In 1920, Samuel Rosenstock, better known as the Romanian poet Tristan Tzara, one of the founders of the Dada movement, which wanted to remake the world as an experientially liberating place...
On 19 July 2015, a sullen, hot day with white skies, an unarmed black man was killed in Cincinnati. The incident began when Officer Ray Tensing, a member of the University of Cincinnati campus...
In the Beat constellation, Allen Ginsberg’s star now shines more brightly than the rest. True, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs glowed on in the aftermath of On the Road (1957) and
Concorde was seen in the sky over West London for the first time in late June 1969. Less than a month later Neil Armstrong stepped from Apollo 11 onto the moon. The future had arrived. It was...
Hieronymus Bosch had a unique facility for depicting on wood and canvas the combination of corruption and innocence that characterises us. Bosch’s abysses, like our own, are inhabited by...