When I walk up Bury Place on my way from Little Russell Street and the London Review office, I get the same view of the British Museum that Vilhelm Hammershøi recorded in 1906....
When, on his 69th birthday, David Bowie released Blackstar, arguably his best record for 35 or even 40 years, it looked for a moment as if he might be hitting his stride again. His previous...
Arriving at his prep school in the bleak winter of 1918 the ten-year-old Osbert Lancaster was made even more miserable than the average new bug by the fact that St Ronan’s, Worthing was...
Frederick Swynnerton was a portrait painter born in Douglas, capital of the Isle of Man, in 1858. His father was a sculptor and stonemason: so were two of his four brothers, Joseph and Mark....
Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mépris has many admirers, and a restored print of it gets star billing in the BFI’s current season devoted to the director. Certainly it offers some...
Politeness is overrated, I thought as I walked through the Newport Street Gallery in early December. The vast new free-to-enter exhibition space in Vauxhall was established by Damien Hirst, a...
It is a curious fact of history, which my research on antiquarianism has brought home to me, that if something is believed in or wanted for long enough, it will eventually materialise. From...
After many long nights in the laboratory listening to encoded versions of Suzanne Vega’s intimate a cappella song ‘Tom’s Diner’ on thousand-dollar headphones, the Fraunhofer team...
In 1849 Flaubert was in Cairo with his friend Maxime Du Camp, a rising littérateur as well as the official photographer for their tour of the Middle East. On 1 December, Flaubert wrote...
Perhaps because it’s based on a lively trilogy of novels for supposed teenagers, more probably because its writers and directors knew how to have a good time with stereotypes, The Hunger...
How close can you get? That seems to be the question Lee Miller’s war photographs are trying to answer. In theory, it’s the question behind any action shot, or any embedded...
‘This is a film about toy trains. These are real toys – not scale models. That doesn’t mean that toys are good and scale models are bad – but they are different.’...
By the 1780s, when the German writer Pierce von Campenhausen visited the Ottoman dependency of Moldavia, its capital, Iaşi, belonged to an Orient that would be familiar to readers of Edward...
Paintings like these give the lie to the idea that ‘unreality’ in Goya, where it exists, is rooted in an essentially personal, irremediable pathology.
There are some fine shots of the title thoroughfare in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001), a new release from the Criterion Collection. It’s all bushes and darkness and bends in...
When does weather begin? In the sense of detailed, day-to-day observations of light and temperature, the stuff of art and conversation, weather would seem to be a relatively late development....
The photographer Vivian Maier worked for me for three years in the early 1980s, though no one knew she was a photographer then. She was in her late fifties, I was in my late thirties. I had a...
The media coverage of Corbyn’s first few days oscillated giddily between stories demonstrating his personal insufficiencies for the role of leader and wailing about what might happen were he ever...