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...
In the first volume of his Coleridge biography, Richard Holmes describes Coleridge and Dorothy and William Wordsworth working ‘like plein-air painters, taking elaborate notes on the varied...
Francis Bacon liked to rail against illustration. ‘If you know how to record it you illustrate it,’ he’d cry. As for ‘illustrational paint’, ughh – the thought...
It’s not easy to believe, but people used to think the Oscars didn’t matter. Now the hoopla takes up half a year, much longer if you take into account that many actors, writers and...
The first film Andrei Tarkovsky shot outside the Soviet Union was Nostalghia – spelled that way because ‘nostalgia’ is too weak an equivalent for the Russian word, the Russian...
Visiting architectural exhibitions is not a substitute for seeing real buildings, and the larger and more colourful pieces in Andrea Palladio: His Life and Legacy (at the Royal Academy until 13...
The Birth of a Nation may not be the greatest movie ever made (whatever that might mean), but it is the one that has had the greatest impact on America and, indirectly, the world. Never was a...
As the credits appear at the end of the movie, it turns abruptly into what it was always longing to be: a musical. The bright colours and the noise become decor and disco. The railway station,...
I had counterfeited before. What I didn’t know at the time, and wish I had (it might have eased my conscience), was that my shifty trip to Russia to steal someone else’s jewellers in order to produce...
On the last Sunday before Christmas, I drove to Blackpool to play poker. You wouldn’t have got me there for any other reason. When I was young, my family used to take day trips to...
In 2006, when a picture from the Saul Steinberg: Illuminations catalogue was reproduced in these pages, the exhibition had just opened in the Morgan Library in New York. Most of the items were...