One of the films showing at the London Film Festival later this month is The Quiet American, starring Michael Caine and Brendan Fraser, directed by Philip Noyce, and based on Graham...
My sanity I gave up long ago when I discussed with a friend whether it was preferable to be mad or fat. But I wouldn’t give up writing. At least I don’t think so . . .
The leopard, the giraffe and the macaw follow no fashion – they are born elegant and appropriately insulated. They cannot, season by season, startle with new patterns of fur or feathers....
One afternoon in May 1995, I rang Ken Loach to try to persuade him to play Fantasy Filmmaking. In fact I had to call a number of British directors, and ask each one to imagine the kind of movie...
Giovanni Pisano and Giotto are widely recognised as the founders of Renaissance sculpture and painting, and Brunelleschi of Renaissance architecture, but it was Leon Battista Alberti (1404-72)...
David Wilkie, 20 years old, a sober, modest son of the manse, came to London from Edinburgh in 1805. He brought with him a couple of pictures, a sound training and great diligence. In 1806 he...
It is possible to love football without loving the culture of the English Premiership. The waves of cash that have rolled into the game since the deal with Sky in 1991 may not have fundamentally...
First, sort out your Scotts. George Gilbert Scott (1811-78), hereafter Sir Gilbert, designed the Albert Memorial, the Foreign Office and the tumultuous cliff of a hotel that shields St Pancras...
A personable, middle-aged woman, humiliated beyond bearing, bursts into tears. Her boss reacts with a crude male-chauvinist taunt, and fires her. Their tiff starts a scandal and stalls a...
A couple of miles from the centre of Manchester, on the bank of the Ship Canal, the Imperial War Museum North stands – all bright in gleaming aluminium. A new pedestrian bridge crosses to it...
Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue II (1967) Only about 120 of Barnett Newman’s sparse output of paintings survive, and nothing from before the mid-1940s, so the 109 items in the...
Late in August I visited Documenta 11, the most recent version of the mega-exhibition that has been held in the German city of Kassel since 1955, when Arnold Bode, a professor of art at the Kassel...
The Criterion, T.S. Eliot’s periodical, ran from shortly after the First World War to the very eve of World War Two. Or, if one prefers, from one of Eliot’s major bouts of depression...
Before 1983 the Chelsea Physic Garden was a secret place you glimpsed from the top of a bus passing along the Embankment. Not many got through its gates – one director, at least, took...
Duke Ellington’s ten-man group of 1927-32 was billed for a time as the Jungle Band, a title in keeping with the Southern plantation/Afro-Deco interior and exotic-erotic floor shows of the...
Elvis was photographed in a Hawaiian shirt, so were Bing Crosby (he had his own label), Harry Truman and Walt Disney. They are beach wear – proof that you are on vacation. The style was...
In Cairo and Abu Dhabi, the two Arab capitals I have visited this year, street and palace are for once in harmony. A pre-emptive strike against Saddam Hussein on the grounds that he might, at...
If you watch The Simpsons or South Park – cartoon serials where gangs of doodles get to demonstrate the wisdom in modern stupidity – you come to feel that the characters are really...