First, a somewhat spittle-laden squawk: how one positively slavers for a good biography of the astonishing French artist known as Claude Cahun (1894-1954). Mention her in conversation and you are...
Full recognition came late to Louise Bourgeois. Born in France in 1911, she married the American art historian Robert Goldwater in 1938 and moved to New York, where she worked first as a painter...
Julian Bell has written a tremendous history of world art, one that will inevitably be compared with Gombrich’s The Story of Art, published nearly sixty years ago. Since then image-making...
Getting embedded in Iraq is less controversial than you’d think, to judge from the views of journalists who’ve worked there since the invasion. Our own man Patrick Cockburn believes...
The highlight of the year, for a small singing group I belong to, is an evening’s work with a conductor who specialises in 16th-century music. We practise hard in advance. Our repertoire is...
On 1 February 1968 Eddie Adams took a photograph of the South Vietnamese chief of police standing in the street and shooting a Vietcong suspect in the head. The picture is listed on the web as...
Millais was adept at many things. At theatre, for instance: in his 1878 Royal Academy showpiece, he cast the supposed murder victims of Richard III as two pretty, tremulous schoolboys poised on a...
Horror movies are often about materialisation in a very particular sense, the grisly acting out of fears and phobias that in daily life are kept safely (if painfully and disastrously) in the...
Essex, the most overlooked and undersold of counties, is under siege. In the north, it is menaced by the BAA, with its overweening commercial ambitions for Stansted Airport, starting with a...
The Painting of Modern Life, the first show at the Hayward Gallery curated by its American director, Ralph Rugoff, is an ambitious attempt to see how this artistic project stands nearly 150 years...
Because the man himself is so ungainly, it is easy to overlook Michael Moore’s voice. Where his body seems ungovernable and a source of embarrassment to him – he often can’t...
Twenty years ago at Eden Park, Auckland, as the minutes ticked down to the final of the first rugby union world cup, a correspondent for Libération caught the mood in the French changing...
The reasons usually given for the death or dearth of westerns is that the genre deals in stark old allegories of good and evil and we are all moral sophisticates now who know the world...
In 1890, the neo-Impressionist Paul Signac offered to paint Félix Fénéon, the very coiner, four years previously, of the term ‘neo-Impressionist’. The critic-subject...
From 1 to 22 September the two floors of the Victoria Miro gallery in Islington – warehouse-like both in scale and in finish – were the site of installations by the American artist...
It is very difficult to kill a child by giving it sedatives, even if killing it is what you might want to do. I asked a doctor about this, one who is also a mother. It was a casual, not a...
Modern lives look prim beside the turbulent existence of Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin. Distractions and misfortunes proliferated throughout his career: shipwreck (he was in his own boat,...
Looking into cases at the small, utterly engaging exhibition of Indian paintings at the British Museum (Faith, Narrative and Desire, until 11 November) I kept bumping my head against the glass....