At 8 o’clock on the night of 30 October 1938, listeners to Orson Welles’s Mercury Theater on the Air might have noticed a short announcement: the show that evening was going to be an...
“The British lad magazine is not about men at all or about the business of being a grown-up person; it’s fuelled by a childish notion of hedonism – pills, thrills and bellyaches – which sees politics...
Much of the literature of the 19th century grew out of sibling relationships. Tennyson’s first publication was a family project, with contributions from three brothers. The...
America is in a muddle about mourning. The standard newspaper of record, the New York Times, registers this muddle in its national edition of 30 April with a depth and clarity that one can...
You have to trust yourself in front of a Twombly. The critics won’t help. They’re worried about naivety – Twombly’s, or possibly their own – and tend to...
The show of Islamic art in the Hermitage Rooms at Somerset House, Heaven on Earth, confirms the general impression you get from royal collections that princes, like children, are drawn to bright,...
The provocation begins with the name. Lars Trier, a boy from Denmark, went to film school and changed his name to the more aristocratic Lars von Trier. In Trier on von Trier the question of the...
In his essay In Praise of Shadows, published in 1933, the novelist Jun’ichiro Tanizaki described and defended an aesthetic which, he said, suffused the traditions of daily life,...
Should I ever find myself competing on Mastermind, I have long thought that I would choose as my specialised subject Hergé’s adventures of Tintin. I first came to this conclusion at...
As a child, I suffered a nerdish fever for authenticity and origins of all kinds, one which led me into some very strange cultural places. Any time I heard that, say, David Bowie was only really imitating...
Sylvia Townsend Warner in 1927 by Cecil Beaton. The photographs of themselves that people like are only a fraction of those which exist. Ticks on contact sheets are outnumbered by angry...
Architects don’t come much angrier than Ernö Goldfinger. Even among his own disillusioned generation, he seemed perpetually crosser than most. Towering, handsome, self-assured...
Few Western journalists saw much of the war in Iraq. Some were corralled in US central command headquarters in Qatar and dependent on Brigadier-General Vincent Brooks’s daily news...
Arshile Gorky is better known for his role in 20th-century American art than he is for his actual work. The collective memory, besides noting that his art reputedly links 1930s Surrealism to...
It has become conventional to ask of Picasso’s early work how he came to invent Cubism, the style fundamental to the course of 20th-century aesthetics. Its influence can be seen in...
‘I have no use for a writer who directs my attention to himself and to his wit instead of the people he is interpreting,’ Jean-Luc Godard said in one of his early articles for Cahiers...
Just two of the fabled world exhibitions of the 19th century are still remembered. They are the two with the best claim to have reshaped the culture of their times. London 1851 was a paean to...
Kazimir Malevich was the most enigmatic and the most provocative painter of the early Soviet period. He can be seen as a pioneer of abstraction and of the minimalist works produced many years...