There is a difference between being slow and being sluggish, although it’s not easy to define. Perhaps we’re sluggish if we’re failing to make progress. If we’re slow,...
The retrospective of Richard Estes’s work (until 8 February) is dazzling in more than one sense. From the late 1960s, when he established his mature style, his paintings of New York make...
Constant Lambert is a composer one would like to have met. This has nothing in particular to do with the quality of his music, though he was a much better composer than you might deduce from...
If you walk through the main galleries of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge just now you’ll find yourself on a creepy treasure hunt. A one-legged mannequin on a crutch rests near...
The assessment of Giovanni Battista Moroni written in 1648 by Carlo Ridolfi, his first biographer, has never been seriously challenged. Ridolfi says that Moroni, a pupil of Alessandro Moretto...
A new year! A new you! This is supposed to be the time for self-improvement, which makes me wonder what’s gone wrong for 2015. We’re used to the newspaper supplements’...
Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan begins and ends as a harsh parable of the isolated individual’s losing battle against a corrupt, tentacular system. The director himself, in a...
After three or four hours in the Linbury Galleries at Tate Britain, examining, admiring, taking notes on the Late Turner exhibition (until 25 January), I wandered into the café to take...
Instead of the new season fantasy every woman is instructed to have as autumn approaches, this September I dreamed of throwing all my clothes out. Things that I used to turn to – a...
I am waiting for a plane at Newark. Time was when anywhere in an airport was a good place to read, or just to go slack and empty, to be nobody in particular and, by that token, more...
Rembrandt paints faces. When he finds himself in a world where appropriate facial expressions do not come to mind he is in trouble.
On 6 November, after ten days of legal argument in the High Court, judgment was handed down in the dispute over the University of London’s obligations towards the Warburg Institute. The...
It’s been five years and ten months. I confess to a bit of nostalgia for the nihilism that came with being governed by George W. Bush. For all the continuities, Obama arouses more...
In the latest Coors Light Ice Bar cinema advertisement, Jean-Claude Van Damme slices through enormous ice blocks with his bare hands and shatters them with a single thrust of his legs. Perhaps it...
Writing to his friend Stephen Bann, then a graduate student, in 1964, Ian Hamilton Finlay outlined his plans to treat readers of his brash new journal, Poor. Old. Tired. Horse, to a free...
Robert Wyatt is one of the last survivors of the 1960s pop music scene in Britain. He has been recording for nearly half a century. He was said to be reckless and unfocused for most of his...
The French national necropolis of Notre Dame de Lorette lies on a plateau to the north of Arras where a pilgrims’ chapel once stood. The bodies of some forty thousand French soldiers who...
Monsieur Hulot, with his manic politeness and his endless, baffled curiosity, loped into movies in 1953 in Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday. He became instantly familiar, although there was a...