C.R. Cockerell’s Ashmolean Museum of 1845 has a pedimented central bay with projecting wings. The architectural detail – in two colours of stone, used very prettily – draws on...
The elongated shards of smog grey, pea green and lemonade that, since 1968, have cast a wan light on pews reserved for the use of MPs in St Margaret’s, Westminster, are untypical of John...
Cape Town is in a state of serious dislocation because of next summer’s football World Cup. The huge new 68,000-seater stadium at Green Point is virtually complete but there are roadworks...
There is a certain kind of Jewish joke that doesn’t end, but peters out in a shoulder-shrugging way, as if to say: ‘You thought this was going to be a joke?’ I’ll spare...
Ask ‘What are they for?’ of objects in a design museum and you get good answers. Cups are to drink from, hats are to wear. In an art gallery, where the relevance of the use such...
At the moment the television channel that speaks most directly to young people is ITV2. As I sit at my desk writing this diary, the channel is showing an episode of the American problems-show
Writing his memoirs in 1946, two years before his death, Sergei Eisenstein declared that he had ‘been fascinated by bones and skeletons since childhood’. His first experience of film...
‘Whatever my work was made up of in the beginning,’ Ed Ruscha said in 1989, ‘is exactly what it is like today.’* Well, not ‘exactly’, but his art is...
A prim and eager young clerk, working for his art-dealer uncle, is writing to his schoolboy brother. Pictures and books are the 19-year-old’s meat and drink: he soon adds Millais, Dickens...
The exhibition Moctezuma: Aztec Ruler, at the British Museum until 24 January 2010, is sombre and disturbing – the chirpy half-rhyme in the title hits a wrong note. (The catalogue says not...
‘I inhabit the cinema,’ Agnès Varda says at the end of her autobiographical film, The Beaches of Agnès. ‘It’s my house. It seems I have always lived...
In Frank Auerbach’s Recent Pictures, at Marlborough Fine Art (until 24 October), there may appear to be a compulsive zest. Alleyway and streetscape, seated figure and reclining head, are...
‘We’re confident it’s real’: Arthur Aron is a psychologist who has discovered that blood-flows in the brains of people claiming to be in love after decades of marriage...
Sports administration is one of those jobs which have built into them the fact that they attract attention only when things go wrong. A school sports day takes quite a bit of organising; anything...
The spacecraft hangs above Johannesburg, like a relic from Star Wars that couldn’t find the parking dock. It manages to look both otherworldly and scruffy, battered, rusting. Unplugged...
The new titles on the table in the bookshop, a cast of hundreds, gather for a curtain call. Like the chorus girl who breaks rhythm on the night a talent scout is in the audience, they will try...
‘You will see that this little clicking contraption with the revolving handle will make a revolution in our life – in the life of writers,’ Tolstoy allegedly said on his 80th...
What would you get if you combined The Great Dictator with Pulp Fiction and shifted the scene to France? One answer might be Quentin Tarantino’s new film, Inglourious Basterds, but...