Until recently, one of the most remarkable unbeaten records in sport belonged to a football manager, the much reviled Portuguese provocateur and clotheshorse José Mourinho. Before Real...
Kew Gardens has supplied the forecourt of the British Museum with an Australian garden. The plants are familiar. Gum trees, for example, fill so many native niches that there is a species to suit...
Something remarkable happened one night in 1920, during a performance of Iolanthe at the Prince’s Theatre. After the chorus had sung To say she is his mother is an utter bit of folly! Oh,...
In Carlos Saura’s film Tango (1998), the chief character is making a musical about making a musical. The film is shot (by Vittorio Storaro, cameraman on The Conformist, Last Tango in Paris,...
On Fridays the binmen collect orange plastic bags of recyclables and black bags of corruptibles. I have a particular image of what things would be like if they never came. Some decades ago...
Towards the end of The Cult of Beauty, the V&A’s tremendous survey of the Aesthetic Movement in England (until 17 July), you gradually become aware of low voices issuing from a speaker...
It’s most likely that I first came across the idea of Humphrey Bogart not in a Bogart movie, but in A bout de souffle. Not in 1960, when it came out – I was more likely to have seen
Most of the world’s religions have their holy places, thought to offer closer access to the divinity. Sometimes they are associated with key events in the history of the religion concerned....
An unknown number of years ago a rockfall closed the entrance to a cave in the limestone gorge of the Ardèche river in France. In 1994 three speleologists found air wafting from an opening,...
While John Kasarda shares the title page of this scientific romance masquerading as a work of urban theory, Aerotropolis was written by Greg Lindsay alone. Kasarda, a professor at the University...
I’m not much given to feeling that images make words look poor – often they make them look rich and friendly – but that was certainly my response to two recent viewings of...
On 11 November 1855, a massive earthquake and tsunami destroyed most of Japan’s capital city, Edo, the precursor of modern Tokyo. Roughly 7000 people were reported dead or injured, and the...
In a big rectangular gallery at the V&A (until 10 July) 63 dummies stand in loose groups, males labelled with an M and a number, females with a W. Each supports a garment designed between...
Luc Tuymans’s painting Altar (2002) depicts a wedding chapel in a Mormon temple. It’s a space that only church members are allowed to enter, so – as Ralph Rugoff recounts in the...
Memories of Watteau were important to those who knew him. Thirty-seven when he died of tuberculosis in 1721, he was the subject of seven 18th-century biographies, only two of them by strangers....
I heard a few bars of Chris Corner’s song ‘I Salute You Christopher’ a day or so before the new IAMX album, Volatile Times, was released. The song, which appears on the album,...
The latest wave of the Scandinavian crime invasion: Sarah Lund and her woolly jumpers. The Killing, the powerfully addictive Danish crime drama running on BBC4 on Saturday nights, has become the...
The finest moment in Julie Taymor’s film of The Tempest occurs when the story has ended. Behind the credits a book drifts down through water, its leather covers separating from its bound...