Of all the 19th-century innovations disparaged by Eric Hobsbawm as ‘invented traditions’, the white wedding must rank alongside clan tartans as the most enduring, a convention now...
In 1973, when George Balanchine was asked by his biographer Bernard Taper to appraise the previous decade of his life, he replied: ‘It’s all in the programmes.’ He meant...
To make a DIY tear-gas mask first cut the bottom off a large plastic bottle. Then turn it upside down and cut away a tall U-shaped area big enough to put your face into. Get a dust mask, soak...
In the spring of 1965, on the road between Memphis and Hollywood, desert plains all around, his bloodstream torqued by a tinnital static of prescription ups and downs, Elvis Presley finally broke down.
At the centre of a wide shot, near the centre of the film, stands Philip Seymour Hoffman: scruffy, genial, large, mildly enigmatic. He is in a city park, trees all around him, leaves beneath...
It is as if the wildly inflated claim that Richard Wilson ‘transformed’ European landscape painting can only be given even a touch of credibility by passing him off as a Londoner, or at least...
On 16 October 1940 the house in Tavistock Square in which Virginia Woolf had lived for 15 years was destroyed by a bomb. The first image in the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition...
London’s population is near its peak, its skyline mangled by ‘the erection of tall buildings, especially if they are of eccentric or self-promoting “iconic” design’.
How many Maleviches were there? Though renowned as a pioneer of abstraction, especially for the stark geometry of his Suprematist canvases, Kazimir Malevich worked in many styles over the...
The secret beating heart of the dream office is the stationery cupboard, the ideal kind, the one that opens to enough depth to allow you to walk in and close the door behind you.
Modern art was born into a market economy, and by the early 20th century it could no longer ignore its commodity status. While some artists sought to escape this condition through abstraction,...
We know a gratifying amount about William Byrd, partly thanks to quite recent archival rediscoveries, and Kerry McCarthy splendidly and concisely presents it all in this intelligent and...
By the time he was elected to the Académie française in 2004, Alain Robbe-Grillet had suffered a cruel fate: he had all the renown he could have hoped for but few readers to show for it.
One of Baudelaire’s Petits Poèmes en prose, ‘Le Joujou du pauvre’ (‘The poor child’s plaything’), opens with the remark that very few amusements are...
For three years David Blunkett, then the Labour home secretary, had an affair with Kimberly Fortier, publisher of the Spectator. The affair came to an end in the summer of 2004. A few weeks...
Apart from the chance invention of Prussian blue soon after 1700, the range of colours available to artists changed very little until the 19th century, when modern chemistry came into its own....
Heaven knows there are reasons enough for anyone to feel miserable about Facebook: the mediation and commodification of ordinary human relationships, the mediation and commodification of every...
Georges Franju’s Judex (1963), expertly restored and newly released by Criterion, invites us to time travel of a double kind: into the 1960s, when it was made, into the 1910s, where it...