Edvard Munch’s art was made from his troubles. When, in middle age, he retreated to the estate he had bought on the outskirts of Oslo (then still called Kristiania), love affairs, drink, a...
The first rule when concocting a conspiracy theory is not to make any claims that can be proved not to be true. It won’t do, for example, to assert that John Kennedy was shot by Jackie...
Early evenings are upon us, bringing the concomitant pleasure of looking at dusk into the lit rooms of strangers. To assuage the curiosity partial views of private places elicit we have London...
I’m in a pout about this book; I’m conflicted. On the one hand, there are several respects in which it seems to me to be very good. Mithen knows a great deal and he writes well by the...
Malcolm Bull has written a formidable handbook, for which, I predict, many scholars and lovers of Renaissance art will never forgive him. What he has to say in the end about the revival of the...
It doesn’t take much to make John Humphrys angry. On the basis of his most recent book, Lost for Words: The Mangling and Manipulating of the English Language (Hodder, £7.99), it would...
It would be nice, particularly after this summer of summers, to think that the Ashes remains the pre-eminent contest in world cricket, and that Anglo-Australian rivalry is still one of the most...
At the entrance to the British Museum’s Persian exhibition, Forgotten Empire (on until 8 January), the King of Many Peoples looms high on a rectangular relief. He dwarfs the attendant who...
In January 1978, the Sex Pistols, then and now the most famous punk band in the world, split up. Johnny Rotten, the band’s singer, most unstable musical element, and most adored and reviled...
There is a painter in Henry James’s Roderick Hudson called Sam Singleton: ‘He painted small landscapes, mainly in watercolours . . . improvement had come hand in hand with...
If you go to The Cambridge Illuminations: Ten Centuries of Book Production in the Medieval West, make sure it’s not on a Sunday or a Monday. The exhibition, which runs until 11 December, is...
Why go to the Venice Biennale and further burden a city already sinking under the pressure of its own attractiveness? It’s simple: the Biennale remains the best crash-course in contemporary...
What the architects Herzog and de Meuron call ‘the waste products of a thought process’ are set out on tables and stacked against walls at Tate Modern until 29 August (the...
“When my father, Barrie Edgar, joined the BBC in 1946, its television service consisted of two studios at Alexandra Palace, and two outside broadcast units. Rising quickly from studio manager to...
The Sun has a knack of dressing up even its most shameless publicity stunts as the performance of its patriotic duty. Last month, the paper carried out yet another variation on its increasingly...
The Joshua Reynolds exhibition at Tate Britain (until 18 September) is subtitled ‘The Creation of Celebrity’. The case for Reynolds as a prime mover in the invention of that modern...
John Carey, former Merton Professor of English Literature at Oxford, an authority on Milton and Donne and Dickens and others, the very model of a Merton Professor, has also been, for decades, the...
‘I well remember at the beginning of the war,’ Gertrude Stein wrote in 1938, ‘being with Picasso on the Boulevard Raspail when the first camouflaged truck passed. It was at...