It’s early evening. The family races home from its daily pursuits: Bart and Lisa from school, on skateboard and bike respectively; Homer in his car from his job at the nuclear plant; Marge...
An exhibition of the work of Prunella Clough runs at Tate Britain until 27 August; it then transfers to Norwich and Kendal. Clough was born in 1919, had her first one-woman show in 1947, and in...
Being the son of an Israeli civil engineer I never believed I would one day write something about architecture. My father would come back home with many boring black and white sketches, and I...
A new exhibition, Temptation in Eden: Lucas Cranach’s Adam and Eve, runs at the Courtauld Institute of Art until 23 September. It consists of five paintings: Cupid Complaining to Venus,
Before he discovered literature in a friend’s apartment in New York, Bob Dylan’s connection to the world beyond the narrow one into which he was born came almost exclusively from the...
Marlon Brando didn’t believe in acting, except in real life, and he took every opportunity, in interviews and his autobiography, to trash the profession. It’s tempting to say this is...
When was colour? Should we think back to the passion of postwar Americans for acrylic and metallic surfaces, for keeping the ‘paint as good as it was in the can’, in Frank Stella’s phrase?...
One history of British photography that can be put together from How We Are: Photographing Britain (at Tate Britain until 2 September) traces changes in what people chose or were able to record....
As Saul Bellow once wrote, we have a problem talking about Mozart. It is the fear of having to contemplate transcendence and being embarrassed by something for which we have no vocabulary. To...
In the annals of American intelligence, the mid-1950s were the golden years: the CIA overthrew elected governments in Iran and Guatemala, conducted experiments with ESP and LSD (using its own...
On the evening of 15 February 1957, the New York Times correspondent Herbert Matthews stepped into a jeep with some anti-government activists and went to meet the young Fidel Castro in the Sierra...
One of the great pleasures of reading Tony Harrison is the sense of quick passage between worlds, the sudden switch from the local to the international and back. At one moment he immerses us in a...
It is like the first paragraph of a bit of old-fashioned science fiction: ‘Overnight, figures, the size and shape of men, mysteriously appeared on high points of city buildings. All could...
During the row over weaponry that thundered on during the G8 summit at Heiligendamm – drowning out the distant shouts of protesters and the platitudinous murmuring of soon-to-be-ex-world...
In the introduction to her authoritative biography of Shostakovich, published in 2000, Laurel Fay sounds a sharp warning about the historical value of personal reminiscences: Fascinating and...
When critics accused Jean-Pierre Melville of shooting his characters as if they were in a gangster movie, he didn’t take the remark as a compliment. ‘Absolutely idiotic,’ he...
To the National Gallery in search of hands and feet. It is Sunday and by coincidence a procession crosses my path holding stools and drawing books. From what I can see on the odd sheet this seems...
At an early point in his career, probably no later than 1930, Walt Disney lost the ability to draw what he wanted his cartoon characters to look like or his animations to do. So he began to act...