‘If the world should end tomorrow,’ James Agee wrote in the Nation in 1947, ‘this film would furnish one of the more appropriate epitaphs: a sad, magnificent summing-up of a...
Rodin’s major work is, in one form or another, on show at the Royal Academy (until 1 January). The exhibition begins in the Burlington House courtyard with The Gates of Hell. Most of the...
The odd thing is that most of the contributors to these books doubt whether it is possible to offer a clear and distinct idea of the subject under discussion. Indeed, Karen Painter, one of the...
The average maximum temperature in Madrid in mid to late April is 18 °C. It would have been somewhat cooler than that in the Bernabéu Stadium, at 9 p.m. on 23 April 2005, when...
Young’s Brewery is quitting Wandsworth. Its drays, loaded with casks and drawn by shire horses which also did a stint pulling the lord mayor’s coach, were still on the streets when we...
Counterpoint, the art of combining two or more independent melodic lines, is the prime distinguishing feature of Western music. Music began with monody – unaccompanied melody – and...
‘Your town,’ the TV presenter says to her guest on a live talk show, ‘has the highest incidence of insanity in the whole of Spain. Do you think this fact explains the story you...
Ron Mueck sculpts mottled skin, wrinkles, hairy forearms, calluses, double chins, freckles, bumpy nipples, yellowing nails and lined foreheads. His work depends on detail. He wants his...
If the Dalai Lama ever makes it back to Lhasa, as excited press reports have suggested he might, he won’t recognise the place. The city that he left in 1959 had fewer than 30,000...
One day Ava Gardner dropped by the studio publicity department at MGM. She wanted to take a look at all those cheesecake photos they were always taking of her: throwing a beach-ball; licking an...
The death toll in Iraq continues to rise: more than 2600 American soldiers, 113 British troops, 130 from other countries, perhaps 40,000 Iraqi civilians. And more than 70 journalists,...
The hot, humid weather these last weeks has made me more conscious of the ways people stand and move about. Exposed flesh increases in area as the temperature rises. Traditional hot-country...
Something eerie is going on with the right-wing talk-radio shock jocks. All of a sudden they’ve stopped pounding the war drums and gone back to custody battles being unfair to fathers and...
Thomas Sheridan, the father of the more famous Richard Brinsley Sheridan, devoted himself in the 1760s to ‘rubbing away the roughnesses of the Scottish tongue’. His volume of Lectures...
From the balcony, seven floors above the coast road, I watch the pepper-grey beach disdain its nuisance presences: night-fishermen, scavengers sweeping the shingle with metal detectors for small...
There are all kinds of differences between movies and television, and one of them is that TV thrives on situations, faces, interruptions and short-term drama, which is why games, soap operas and...
Angus McBean knew that he knew how to please. Actors, he said, were terrified of having pictures taken, but ‘the stars often get to know a photographer and to trust him, and thank goodness...
Inside a shopping mall in Fargo, North Dakota there is a museum dedicated to the memory of Roger Maris, one-time star of the New York Yankees and home run champion of baseball. When I visited in...