In 1972, at the age of 13, Francesca Woodman photographed herself sitting on the end of a sofa at her home in Boulder, Colorado. The room looks like a studio; Woodman’s parents were...
In one of the diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks Putin and Medvedev are compared to Batman and Robin. It’s a useful analogy: isn’t Julian Assange, WikiLeaks’s organiser, a...
In his lifetime his reputation was high, but Sir Thomas Lawrence was scarcely buried – with great pomp in the crypt of St Paul’s – before the feeling spread that his work had...
Freedom, in the words of the old Irish nationalist song, comes from God’s right hand. As with the gift of divine grace, it puts its recipients on the spot. Are we in a fit state to receive...
The employees gather outside the shop in the morning, waiting for the boss to arrive and let them in, and already a curious sort of time travel begins, memories of what will be this film’s...
31 December 2009, Yorkshire. Call Rupert to the back door to watch a full moon coming up behind the trees at the end of the garden. It’s apparently a ‘blue moon’, i.e. the...
When you shut your eyes you still see. If the light is strong you register a red haze as it passes through your eyelids, or the retinal after-images of bright objects. But even without residual...
I’m going to hang on to Keith Richards’s autobiography, because sometimes I worry that I lead a boring life and wonder if I shouldn’t try harder to have fun. When that happens,...
Last month’s release of US diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks raised some eyebrows in France. Le Monde, one of the selected press outlets in the latest syndication, posed as the honest,...
During 2009, it was difficult to find anybody inside the newspaper business who was not profoundly depressed about the future of the industry. All the trend lines were downwards. The migration of...
Stephen Sondheim is America’s master of musical theatre, as long as we are prepared for the work to be brilliant but not relaxed. His is a voice of solitude struggling to believe in...
Edward Said first met Daniel Barenboim by chance, at the reception desk of the Hyde Park Hotel in June 1993; Said mentioned he had tickets for a concert Barenboim was playing that week. They began to...
The upright canvas, some 4’6’’ by 3’, stood on Salvator Rosa’s easel, prepared with a burnt umber ground. The painter first attacked it, as far as I can see, with a...
Cézanne, whose work was the touchstone for critical thinking and writing on art for more than a century, cannot be written about any more. After a few minutes in the exhibition at the...
The Maestro is clearly moved by what he has just heard. I’d put us around Bobcat Flats between Fallon and Ely on US 50 in Nevada, which likes to call itself the ‘loneliest road in...
Fear, like happiness, has its anniversaries, and 1960 was a good year for watching frightened women’s faces: first Peeping Tom and then Psycho. The second movie is far more famous and more...
It’s illegal to drive while you’re on your mobile phone, so why do galleries ask you to listen on headsets while you look at pictures? There is plenty of evidence – intuitive,...
The hero of the Toy Story trilogy is a toy cowboy. In Toy Story 3 when the toys belonging to Andy, now about to leave for college, find themselves at a daycare centre, and a kindly bear welcomes...