The Kandinsky exhibition at Tate Modern until 1 October is subtitled ‘The Path to Abstraction’. As he stripped his work down, Kandinsky believed he was removing obstacles on the way...
For two years, beginning in January 1964 and ending in late 1966, hundreds of individuals trooped through Andy Warhol’s midtown Manhattan studio (the vast, silver-painted loft known as the...
8 June. Time for predictions. The entrails say that history seems to be the best guide to performance in World Cups. In the last six Cups, going back to 1982, 11 out of 12 slots in the final have...
‘It’s not a Hitchcock picture,’ the master told François Truffaut. He was being a little cagy, but in one sense he was right. Rebecca, now showing in a brand-new,...
Her fame kept growing, but it was unstable, even too fragmented to outlive her. Right now her name is largely unrecognised, except by experts in either photography or Surrealism, or by those eager to...
It’s elephant time for our cherry tree. Ripe fruit glistens among dark green leaves. A flock of starlings – some black, glossy and speckled, some buff-brown juveniles – land and...
Fixing a football match is a risky business. Players can be bribed, but things can go wrong when thousands of fans are watching. The alternative is to offer the referee a backhander. A German...
Since being acquitted of child molestation charges last summer, Michael Jackson has been hanging out in Bahrain, enjoying the hospitality of the ruler’s poptastic son Sheikh Abdullah....
The success of Tate Modern in attracting visitors has been phenomenal. It is a place where believers in modern art, unbelievers, the informed and the merely curious mingle. There is no...
Has any other contemporary designer ‘signed’ as many cityscapes as Norman Foster? Perhaps no architect since Christopher Wren has affected the London skyline so dramatically, from the...
As a Manchester United supporter who was born and grew up in Bristol, I have long been the subject of derision. There are loads of jokes. How many United fans does it take to change a light bulb?...
The BBC claims to be looking forward to a newly interactive and demanding audience of ‘participants and partners’ and ‘communities’ and so on; but there is an opposing possibility,...
Despite everything Auden said, there are plenty of works by Old Masters, even at the Musée des Beaux Arts in Brussels, in which suffering and death take centre stage, in which the drama is...
It’s not true to say that only bad books make the bestseller list. But it is a little bit true, and it is always the case that bad books greatly outnumber good ones at the top end of the...
The great secret of Ron Howard’s movie version of The Da Vinci Code has nothing to do with murders, cryptology, the Templars, Opus Dei, Mary Magdalene, or the idea that Christ might have...
Exhibitions illustrating the interaction of cultures often display one-way relationships – the influence of Japanese prints, say, on French 19th-century painting. Not so the exhibition
Though this measure quaint confine me, And I chip out words and plane them, They shall yet be true and clear, When I finally have filed them. Love glosses and gilds them . . . Arnaut...
Thucydides claimed that posterity should not judge the power and dignity of states by their architectural remains. The power of Sparta over much of the Peloponnese and beyond could not have been...