In Magnificent Maps at the British Library (until 19 September) you are surrounded by splendid, if overbearing peaks of cartographic art: an atlas as tall as a man, wall maps of similar size,...
Blythe House, a late Victorian pile close to Olympia, was built to house the Post Office Savings Bank. It’s now the V&A’s working store for its art and design collections. Tiled...
On 30 January 1734 eight young men met for supper at the Golden Eagle Tavern in Suffolk Street near Charing Cross. They were a high-spirited, hard-drinking and well-connected group. One was an...
Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant provokes two questions even before we’ve thought much about the film. Both are about timing. Why did it take the best part of a year after its US...
She is recognisable even in the grey, pixellated CCTV images: a tall, slender woman with grey hair, her oval glasses perched on an aquiline nose. She is looking to her right, a stern expression...
‘God created man.’ There are various ways you might read those words even without looking beyond the scriptures. Set them in the context of archaeology and a different reading...
One night in 1942, Nikolai Starostin, founder of the Spartak Moscow football club, woke to find a torch shining in his eyes and two pistols pointed at his head. He had spent years waiting for his...
Somewhere around the time of the second season of The Sopranos, people at dinner parties stopped gossiping about their friends’ sex lives and started talking about American television...
The release a few months ago of an American chase-thriller called Edge of Darkness brought to mind the 1985 Edge of Darkness: a BBC film originally shown in six parts, and one of the best...
Three mundane facts say superficial but significant things about the look and content of the drawings, particularly the earlier ones, in Fra Angelico to Leonardo: Italian Renaissance Drawings at...
I owe my years as a jazz reporter to John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, which made the British cultural establishment of the mid-1950s take notice of a music so evidently dear to the new...
They hunted dogs with guns, the Berliner said, to clear the streets for the Olympics. He was in Hackney now, an architect, but he had been in Athens in 2002, when the deals were going down and...
Four young Muslim men with Yorkshire accents are taking turns to address the camera in front of a sagging cloth backdrop. ‘Eh up, you unbelieving kuffar bastards,’ one of them begins....
Melchior Lorck went to Turkey in 1555 at the height of Suleiman the Magnificent’s power, when the Ottoman Empire stretched from Algeria to the west, Mecca to the south, Baghdad to the east...
A detective is chatting to a young local at a crime scene, the body a few feet away, all the technicians and policemen going about their business. What has happened, the boy says, is that the...
This exhibition is an attempt to represent the work of one of the most long lived of British artists, whose career began in the aftermath of Culloden in 1746, and ended only six years before the...
A ping-pong table in the Ron Arad: Restless exhibition (at the Barbican until 16 May) shows that you don’t need to change the rules just because you’ve changed the equipment. The...
Those who use repeat patterns – weavers, tile-makers, quilt-makers, wallpaper printers – rub up against the territory of mathematicians. In Symmetry, Marcus du Sautoy describes how,...