Before going down to the National Gallery’s Corot to Monet: A Fresh Look at Landscape from the Collection (until 20 September), it is worth first going upstairs to take in the evening light...
Thinking about the three things I learned yesterday, courtesy of Levine Breaking News – a mysterious right-wing, LA-based, showbiz-obsessed website that sends me, unsolicited,...
A beguiling piece of work by Charles LeDray, Mens Suits (no apostrophe, he insists), can be seen until 20 September at 1 Chiltern Street, W1. The building used to be the local fire station. In...
Before it was a classic film, Gone with the Wind was a classic PR stunt. The film’s producer, David O. Selznick, announced that he would launch a nationwide search for the young woman who...
The chief pleasure of the new version of The Taking of Pelham One Two Three is the sight of John Travolta as the model bad guy. He is genial and livid by turns, entirely persuasive in both moods,...
‘Codex’ is a fancy word for ‘book’, but useful because it distinguishes the physical form from the text it contains. Thus a codex, a set of bound pages, is distinct from a...
Imagine you’re confined to a dark, windowless space, and a piece of music you find especially disagreeable is piped into the room at a volume so piercing it seems to be throbbing inside...
Gwen John’s attic bedroom, Edward Hopper’s Sun in an Empty Room, Adolf Menzel’s open window and blowing curtain, Andrew Wyeth’s New England rooms full of cold, hard light,...
A number of New York subway trains currently have posted in them an advertisement for a suspense novel (Brad Meltzer’s Book of Lies) said to be a combination of The Da Vinci Code and North...
The 20th century was not quite ten years old when, in February 1909, Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto was published in Le Figaro. A photograph taken in Paris in 1912 when Les Peintres...
The life of Nina Simone, who died at the age of 70 in 2003, doesn’t make for a happy tale, but then if it did, who would have written it? Given the melodrama and the perfect fit with the...
In the year 400 a ‘swaying multitude’ attended the funeral of Fabiola, a Roman matron. Everyone in the crowd lining streets and rooftops was ‘flattering himself that he had a...
Following the great parliamentary expenses scandal from afar has been to view my home country through the wrong end of a telescope: so many scuttling figures, comically diminished in scale, like...
Can you die in a synecdoche and would it be a good thing if you could? Would it be like dying in a parenthesis, as Mrs Ramsay does in To The Lighthouse, or would it be entirely different? At the...
Sickert’s Venetian pictures come after the music-hall paintings and before the Camden Town nudes and interiors. He was in the city for long periods at the turn of the last century, but even...
You never doubt that Gerhard Richter’s portraits (an exhibition of them runs at the National Portrait Gallery until 31 May) are pictures of photographs. Pictures of photographs, not...
It is generally assumed that Soviet composers like Prokofiev and Shostakovich were forced by the regime to simplify their style and write ‘life-affirming’ music that conformed to the...