A film clip from the mid-1920s of Josephine Baker dancing, looking as pleased as any extrovert four-year-old to be showing what she can do with her feather skirt and pretty body, is the happiest...
An invisible frontier cuts across the North of Iraq for hundreds of miles, from Syria in the west to Iran in the east. This border doesn’t conform to legal, ethnic or tribal boundaries; it...
Two bishops side by side put pressure at long range on the pawns defending the castled Black king. My queen, ready to advance to the middle of the board, completes the threat. Black will have to...
M aking pictures and dealing in them is an intimate business. In what other marketplace are the principal players – maker, buyer and seller – so close? Van Gogh’s brother...
David Freedberg’s new book is illustrated with wonderful, detailed drawings and engravings of plants, fungi, fossils, birds, insects and animals – nearly all made in the 17th century....
I n November 2001 the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation was set up to guide the reconstruction of the World Trade Center site. It hired the architectural firm Beyer Blinder Belle to draw up...
Starting in this issue, the print edition of the London Review will be running ‘In the Shadow of No Towers’ by Art Spiegelman, an extract from which appears below. Spiegelman has...
T he painting A Man with a Quilted Sleeve in the Titian exhibition at the National Gallery (until 18 May) makes sense as a self-portrait. The bearded young man looks over his shoulder towards you...
H olbein’s double portrait known as The Ambassadors must have been anatomised any number of times since its emergence into public view at the end of the 19th century, and recently had...
B y a happy chance I am reading The Count of Monte Cristo. It acclimatises one to the dramas and Oriental dreams which figure in the exhibition Constable to Delacroix: British Art and the French...
I think it is two years since I’ve been to the cinema. This is something of a mystery to me, like love gone wrong: in fact, it is love gone wrong. Was the love misguided in the first place,...
Sometimes, walking in the woods on a Saturday afternoon, my mother and I came across the local racecourse. She would put the dog on its lead and I would approach the white rails where the horses...
T hough Le Havre lies close to the Normandy beaches, it hardly features in histories of D-Day and its aftermath. Blocked at Caen, the Allied armies broke through to the south, wheeled left and...
Under the headline ‘The Dead Rabbits Immortalised’, the New York Evening Post reported on 10 July 1857 that a one-penny song sheet was selling feverishly ‘in the lower part of...
T ime’s whirligig, as one surly underling told another, brings in its revenges. For the Royal Family, 2002 went bad faster than an over-hung widgeon. In September the Prince of Wales...
T he exhibition of the pre-American work of Mies van der Rohe at the Whitechapel Gallery until 2 March covers half a career – he was 52 when, in 1938, he moved to the States. Despite that,...