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,...
T his 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. T here 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...
W illiam 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...
T he National Gallery of Scotland is now linked with the Royal Scottish Academy building. You can enter by the restaurant which lies between the two buildings at a lower level, or through the...
S ome artists engage with the world. They present a public face and seem eager to value themselves as the world values them. Sales and commissions, praise and dismissal, as they come and go,...
In the technical literature on aesthetics a distinction is often made between the empirical inquiry into beauty (what it is, which objects have it and so forth), and the investigation of sensory...
‘Que se rompe la cuerda’ (‘Let the rope break’), ‘Los Desastres’ plate 77. R obert Hughes has a great enthusiasm for Goya’s art, which he...
‘The Apotheosis of the Bicycle’ (‘Vogue’, 1944). T he National Portrait Gallery has put up a dozen or so photographs by Norman Parkinson to accompany the...
In the build-up to the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, all the talk among the boys at my primary school was of Steve Ovett and Sebastian Coe. Clued-up children – in other words, those whose...
Martha Gellhorn, the war reporter and writer who feared nothing on earth so much as boredom, and hated the ‘kitchen of life’, was enamoured of a different drudgery –...
I n the early 1950s I was awakened by the photographs of Walker Evans and the movies of John Ford, especially Grapes of Wrath where the poor ‘Okies’ go to California with mattresses on...