In literary costume drama even the most exquisitely wrought lace cuff is only as good as its description.
Since the mid-1980s, Edward Burtynsky has been photographing landscapes that have been transformed by human intervention. In his early work – a series on mines and one on railway cuttings...
A static shot, as always. On screen, in the sunshine, a bright yellow combine harvester is toiling across an Oxfordshire wheatfield like a paddle steamer in reverse, churning up a mist of chaff...
There is a tradition of dictator jokes in Latin America (‘What time is it?’ ‘Whatever time you say, General’), and there is even a genre known as the dictator novel, of...
In 2010, I moved from California, where I had lived for 11 years, to Turkey, where I had never stayed longer than a month or two.
The small exhibition at the National Gallery entitled Titian’s First Masterpiece: ‘The Flight into Egypt’, open until 19 August, is centred on a large canvas from the Hermitage....
The earliest published image of the Greek Revival building by William Wilkins which stretches across the north side of Trafalgar Square is an engraving that shows it under construction in 1836,...
A master of impersonation, Cindy Sherman has served as her own model in her photographs since 1975, playing with familiar roles of female identity in series after series of inventive work. From...
Where is the corpse? Who was the man? Why did this woman die? How did she die? These questions are all raised and answered in Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Once upon a Time in Anatolia, but they are...
On 16 August 1960, a US air force captain called Joseph Kittinger stepped out of a balloon. The balloon was 102,800 feet above the Earth. It would be an exaggeration to say that Kittinger jumped...
Leonardo da Vinci is seldom out of the news. The story of 2011 was the Salvator Mundi, a serene and ringletted image of Christ formerly considered the work of a pupil or imitator, but now –...
Titian’s Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto were described by Lucian Freud as ‘simply the most beautiful pictures in the world’. And not long ago, in an act of Alex...
Monroe’s beauty is dazzling, blinding. Of what, then, is she the decoy?
In 1950 the great American fashion photographer Irving Penn wrote to Cecil Beaton, for whom he had recently sat, praising his ‘vague clairvoyance, the gentleness of not meeting the subject...
The cliché is to call Bowie a chameleon, but he was more like the very hungry caterpillar, munching his way through every musical influence he came across.
A few weeks ago I found myself at a party talking to a woman with whom I seemed to have nothing in common. But it turned out she wrote for a New York fashion magazine, and although I never shop,...
A bearded patriarch, possibly in Elizabethan dress, rests on his elbow, stretched out on a snug little hillock in the middle of a wedge-shaped field of corn. He is leaning against some sort of...
The life of Claude Lanzmann, the director of Shoah declares at the beginning of his memoir, has been ‘a rich, multifaceted and unique story’.