I n a memo about Touch of Evil, Orson Welles asked Universal Studios to pay attention to the ‘brief visual pattern’ he had drawn, suggesting improvements for the film. This was...
S onia Delaunay – who designed clothes worn by Gloria Swanson and Nancy Cunard, whose bold zigzag textiles and liveried Citroën graced the cover of the January 1925 issue of Vogue,...
Throughout Back to Black, her glottal-stopped London accent eerily combines with a Motown swing in the phrasing, each element undercutting and enhancing the other to make a smooth-rough-smooth sound...
‘O ne of the most baffling things about America,’ Amiri Baraka wrote in 1963, ‘is that despite its essentially vile profile, so much beauty continues to exist here.’...
O n the field of Waterloo the corner that is for ever England is the Château-Ferme de Hougoumont. Here, on 18 June 1815, 2500 British soldiers held off 12,500 French, nearly a quarter of...
In the days before Eurostar came to the area behind King’s Cross, before St Martin’s, the Guardian, Camden Council’s offices and (soon) Google UK, there existed a few cobbled...
H arold Shand , the fictional chief mobster in The Long Good Friday (1980), now showing in a restored version at the BFI, is played by Bob Hoskins in one of his great early performances....
R iccardo Selvatico , the progressive mayor of Venice in the early 1890s and author of poems and comic plays, lost his post to a less secular, less intellectually minded candidate before the...
T he Surrealists liked to proclaim that everyone who dreams is a poet, and Joseph Beuys that everyone who creates is an artist. So much for the utopian days of aesthetic egalitarianism; maybe...
There are many kinds of eccentric and Satie was most of them.
It took a very special kind of invention to get an awareness of the ‘erratic truth of death’s timing’ into a medium of mass entertainment.
A t La Mécanique des dessous (‘The Mechanics of Undergarments: An Indiscreet History of the Silhouette’), an unexpected exhibition about underwear in Paris two years...
T he films of the Iranian director Asghar Farhadi keep us guessing in all kinds of interesting ways, but also make us wonder whether guessing is what we should be engaged in. The questions the...
I n the old ‘Rothko room’ of the pre-expansion Phillips Collection in Washington DC, it was possible to feel that you had stumbled on a private sanctuary, furnished with a single...
H ow early was early photography? And how long did its earliness endure? The customary answer is just short of three decades, from about 1839 to 1865. The first date marks not the beginning of...
T hree years or so before his death, Richard Diebenkorn illustrated an elegant volume of Yeats’s poems from Arion Press in San Francisco, introduced by Helen Vendler. Vendler had already...
W ords without Music is Philip Glass’s second book about himself, and it inevitably includes some of the same information, or the same kind of information, as its predecessor, published...
M ajestic, awesome, sublime. Ah, the triviality of human existence compared to the aloof grandeur of the Alps. Words and thoughts along these lines are what the carefully stereotyped...