When Toho Studios released Gojira in November 1954, Japanese audiences, according to William Tsutsui, watched its scenes of destruction ‘in respectful silence, sometimes leaving the...
When we admire genre paintings of the Dutch Golden Age for their realistic representation of everyday life, we may be responding as much to the spell of the 19th century as to the artistry of the...
Two signs point to Port Sunlight as you drive up the A41. The first (a blue one) sends you to the factory, the second (a brown one, indicating a cultural monument) sends you to the village and the...
This movie version of the play will just about do. It has most of the virtues and most of the faults endemic to such ventures, but it exposes the latter less grossly than some. As Shylock Pacino...
Manet’s brisk little painting of a frieze of men in black opera hats and a few leggy girls in bright fancy dress, Masked Ball at the Opera (1873), kicks off Faces in the Crowd: Picturing...
‘Manhattan is Modern Again!’ the advertisements exclaim, as if this status depended on the new Museum of Modern Art alone. ‘A transcendent aesthetic experience,’ the New...
Growing up in Durban in the 1950s, I could see how keen Coloured and Indian cricketers were, how much everything was tilted against them and, at the same time, how good white South African...
Rudolph Valentino, according to his first-rate biographer, Emily Leider, who has already distinguished herself by writing the definitive book on Mae West, had a ‘slightly...
The scaffolding that hugs One Times Square, where the US Drug Enforcement Administration’s travelling exhibition Target America: Traffickers, Terrorists and You is on view until 31 January,...
This year Zaha Hadid won the Pritzker Prize. The award was founded by Jay Pritzker who owned the Hyatt hotel chain – not that the winners of the prize have produced much that looks at all...
‘People of all generations just stood around, uncertain of what to do next … It sort of petered out.’ Bruce Laughton’s William Coldstream is an attempt, 17 years on, to...
It’s not every day that the soccer tifosi, those hardcore empiricists, come face to face with a well nigh theoretical observation to the effect that ‘football matches are...
‘The Dance’, 1988. There is a display of Paula Rego’s work at Tate Britain until 2 January. Her pictures invite, demand even, that you attend to what they are about as well...
William Nicholson painted in white ducks and patent leather shoes. In photographs and caricatures his neat head sits on high white collars. He liked spotted shirts and fancy waistcoats. He was...
The turbine hall of the old power station is cathedral-like. Its dimensions and proportions, the windows at each end and the choir-screen bridge that divides the nave space of the entrance from...
Adolf Eichmann is not an obvious candidate for a full-length biography, and before his capture in 1960 and trial the following year no one would have thought of writing one. The historical record...
In November 1980, when the LRB was still in its infancy, barely a year old and only six months independent of the New York Review, Ronald Reagan didn’t simply take the US presidency from...