T here 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...
I f 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...
W hy 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...
W hat 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...
T he 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...
W e acquire mementos: an Eiffel Tower cigarette lighter, a mug from Margate, Michelangelo’s David on a key-ring. All say, in one way or another: ‘I was there.’ It is not just...
Perhaps we have to thank Watergate, even Deep Throat himself, that sussurating, parking-lot ghoul, for planting us in a world where the shriek of actuality has given way to the soft lilt of...
W hen Hans Schmoller first saw a copy of John Berger’s Ways of Seeing – the book was published in 1972 – he hurled it across the room. Schmoller, who had succeeded Jan...
A photograph from a 35 mm film, shot with a normal 50 mm lens, matches up pretty well to what you think you see when you glance at a place or a room. An image printed from a bigger piece of film...
O il paint, the most powerful of mediums, can also be nasty-looking stuff. Watercolour can be feeble or messy, tempera can lack verve, distemper can look flat, but none of them has oil...
A new Alpine House is due to open later this year in the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. But you can already get a good idea of how it will look. Its footprint is small but the curved profile of...
What is wrong with American musical theatre? It seems to make people nervous, in ways that none of the other native forms do. Jazz, rock, movies and television have all been easily absorbed into...
Catching news about the Michael Jackson trial, I can’t help being reminded of a caustic song by Dan Bern, a singer less famous than Jackson by several orders of magnitude, called ‘Too...
How Blake would blench at the ends to which the English left has turned his poem. The vagueness of his vision of Jerusalem helps to make it the handiest of slogans. Officially appropriated as the...