At the end of his two-volume biography, Stephen Walsh writes that Igor Stravinsky’s music is ‘the one unquestioned staple of the modern repertoire, the body of work that, more than...
To understand Nicole Kidman, David Thomson argues, you need to see a film called In the Cut. Not because Kidman is in it. She isn’t. The film stars Meg Ryan, is directed by Jane Campion and...
We are on the edge of the Moroccan desert. Bleak, low mountains, vast sky. A flight of birds fills the screen, and then is gone. Two boys prepare to take a herd of goats to find what food they...
Why should we assume that all attributions of colour have a theoretical purpose – that they always hypothesise the existence of a property in order to explain an observed effect, as we might postulate...
Jacques Chirac’s museum on the quai Branly, opened last summer, continues to pull large crowds at weekends. Chirac, a long-time admirer of what used to be called ‘primitive’...
Like many other plutocrats who are now remembered as great collectors, J. Paul Getty began acquiring works of art in a serious way when he began to die – that is to say, in his forties (he...
The practical mechanics of crucifixion have had a lurid hold on the popular imagination for at least two millennia. The idea that St Peter was crucified upside down was no sooner taken as a sign...
Conrad Black is not the only tycoon to have dreamed of global domination while buying and selling newspapers, and he is not the only tycoon to have had people fawning over him on the way up and...
In September 2004, the German sculptor John Bock turned the main gallery at the ICA into something like a giant treehouse, a cluster of cabins, platforms and dens bashed together out of plywood...
In Christopher Nolan’s movies men are always losing their minds: to revenge and an old phobia in Batman Begins; to a clinical condition in Insomnia; to the vagaries of a crippled short-term...
In the north-west corner of Russell Square, on an extension to the School of Oriental and African Studies, a neatly lettered stone plaque attached to a nicely detailed brown brick wall reads: ...
Who is Bob Woodward? If his books had no jackets, if the prefaces and acknowledgments were ripped away; if you’d never watched American television or read the US papers; if all you had were...
Of the 46 works in Velázquez (National Gallery until 21 January) 13 can be seen in London at any time, mainly for free and without the press of people expected at the current exhibition....
You don’t have to love The Sopranos to see that screen gangsters are a lasting feature of American mythology. And yet a mystery remains, even after all those hits and deaths. The...
On the right of Adam Elsheimer’s Flight into Egypt a full moon hangs above trees which are silhouetted against the night sky. Nothing ruffles the surface of the stream, which reflects both...
Imagine a party attended by sitters from English portraits. The Gainsborough crowd rustle in, a blur of silk and powder. You can’t quite bring their faces into focus, but you seem to...
A lot of the stories, truthful or otherwise, about Picasso are as colourful as they are improbable. Picasso liked the mystery, was eager for no one to be sure what he would do next. Told that...
It sounds like a modern fairytale: in 1971 two architects, neither of them French, win the most important commission in Paris since the war, the design for the Centre Pompidou, and become famous...