English whimsy had a good run for its money in the 1960s. Pop culture hoovered it up and began to mass-produce it in a variety of forms. It’s odd now to remember how it looked on the...
D rawing, like handwriting, uses a repertoire of lines. One kind of drawing concentrates on the straightness of what is straight, the purity of what is curved, and the perfect spacing and...
Stewart has the weakness of a man who can be wounded. He absorbs many moods: self-pity, cynicism, a compulsion that does not know its name – and always there is a disturbing something left over....
Malcolm Hayes tells us that the letters he has selected are merely a quarter of a fifth of those so far available, but one would not want the volume longer. William Walton is no prose stylist,...
‘America’s finest news source’, the Onion, has assembled an omnibus of every issue of the spoof weekly paper published between October 2000 and October 2001. The Onion ad...
Something about the British press attracts Canadians. In the 1920s Max Aitken bought the Daily and Sunday Express, turned them into successful popular papers and became Lord Beaverbrook in the...
Karel Reisz must have been a border-crosser all his life. He was born in 1926, in the Czech mill town of Ostrava, an afternoon’s walk from the Polish border. At the age of 12, he was forced...
I n a photograph in Friday’s evening paper, behind the firemen and the flames rising out of an old oil-drum, I recognised the relief lettering: L.C.C. FIRE BRIGADE STATION EVSTON 1902. I...
T he ability to achieve a likeness was always to some degree an innate talent. At the highest level it was the rarest representational skill and – in England at least – the most...
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 . . .
T he 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...
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)...
D avid 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...