Vampires seem to be making a comeback these days, and not just at night and from the grave. In broad daylight you see sleek sets of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight novels everywhere, and the...
Since 1901 the wide, round-arched entrance in the Whitechapel Gallery’s front on Whitechapel High Street has been open to passers-by; there isn’t even a step to interrupt the level...
Liubov Popova was only 35 when she died of scarlet fever in 1924. Osip Brik remembered her saying that ‘no single artistic success gave me such profound satisfaction as the sight of a...
At the age of 70, we learn from the intimate and largely unpublished letters that are the raw material of Nicholas Fox Weber’s biography, Le Corbusier was still justifying his work, his...
At the time of his death at the age of 97 in 1985, Marc Chagall was, if not the world’s best-known living artist (as much trademark as painter), certainly its best loved. The School of...
There’s nothing like a book about music to remind the reader of the silence. Nothing else insists so emphatically on what we are usually happy to forget: that, during the hours we read, our...
A spectre is haunting the action film these days. It’s not violence. There is nothing spectral about the ubiquitous crashes and bangs, the insistent maiming and killing of persons, the...
The immediate casualty of the attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team in Lahore earlier this month will be the future of cricket in Pakistan. A few optimists point out that the Munich massacre...
‘I have a feeling,’ Picasso said as he got older, ‘that Delacroix, Giotto, Tintoretto, El Greco and the rest, as well as all the modern painters, the good and the bad, the...
Over the winter, you may have seen posters for a movie, certificate 12A (‘moderate fantasy violence and horror . . . limited bloody images’): a bunch of teenagers,...
It is fashionable not to be interested in Jade Goody. Public commentators who seem eager to be done with her have, in the last few weeks, published a succession of irritated articles decrying...
The BBC’s decision to stop showing cricket in the late 1980s was brought about by a combination of the cricket establishment’s greed, misplaced sporting priorities on the part of...
The 1999 exhibition at the Royal Academy celebrated Van Dyck the Antwerp prodigy, precocious master of the northern baroque, Rubens’s star pupil, a painter of mythologies and altarpieces...
I was six the last time I experienced such a naked and indefensible aversion to someone. I was given a new girl to look after at school. She was fat and happy, or so my memory goes. There’s...
What do we remember about Cornelius Cardew? That he was a brilliant avant-garde composer who pioneered free improvisation and led a Scratch Orchestra of musicians and artists; that his father was...
The Second World War was fought both over and inside every cinema in Europe. In 1941 Joseph Goebbels declared that one of his key goals was ‘to establish German film as the dominant...
The Class, known in France as Entre les murs, literally ‘between the walls’, more colloquially ‘inside’, as of a prison or a fortress or a city, is an intelligent, subdued...
Timothy Brook’s subject in Vermeer’s Hat is the ‘global world’ of the 17th century. Brook is a historian of China who wants to consider the lure of China for others. The...