There is a story that Gershom Scholem, the scholar of Jewish mysticism, was being introduced at a lecture in New York. Mysticism, the introducer said sarcastically, is nothing; but a history of...
I can tell you the exact moment when I decided to hate football for life. It was 11 June 1978 at 6.08 p.m. Scotland were playing Holland in the first stage of the World Cup Finals in Argentina. It...
Hide your wives and daughtersHide the groceries tooGreat Nations of Europe coming through . . .T hey came in good ships; their guns were the best. First were the Portuguese, then the...
An overnight success in the making for nearly forty years, Spider-Man had been in the making in the mind of the child sitting behind me (at an 11 o’clock show at a multiplex in Brooklyn on...
V enice is an astonishing survival, preserved from change above all, perhaps, by everyone’s desire to save its fair face. Although Venice in Peril: The British Appeal for the Preservation of...
A bit of a fast-talking dame herself, Maria DiBattista is justifiably excited by the characteristic flip lip of her prewar and wartime Hollywood heroines. In her mind, I imagine, she is of their...
I grew up in Texas with two obsessions: basketball and Romantic verse. Satisfaction of both lay readily at hand. We had a hoop out back overlooked by the kitchen of a curry-house which sent its...
T he Brighton Museum is open again. Ten million pounds has been well spent: it is tidier, lighter, more extensive and more coherent than it was. The rich, crammed display style, which always...
Reyner Banham was as smart and sassy as any critic in the postwar period. What made him distinctive was his passion for the edgiest expressions of his technological age, not only in avant-garde...
Almost every North American museum of art today includes a gallery of modern and contemporary work, and little separates the colonial furniture, the Romantic waterfall and the careworn Rodin nude...
Fats Waller trying to teach an English woman to jitterbug on the transatlantic liner that returned him to America in 1939 after a long musical tour and happy stay in Britain, where he composed...
A retrospective exhibition of the work of Hamish Fulton is at Tate Britain until 4 June. Walking Journey is downstairs from, and in a sense complementary to, American Sublime, another celebration...
At the Grammy awards the other week, an unusual note was struck by Michael Greene, a record industry bigwig. The only real point of interest at most award ceremonies is the frocks (and sometimes,...
‘Perhaps it is too soon to call this one of the greatest motion pictures of all time,’ the New York Times said in June 1942, ‘but it is certainly the finest yet made about the...
Living as we do in the Land of the League Table, there’s sadly little call to be surprised by the appearance of what some will see as a prosopographical breakthrough: a book confidently...
T wo exhibitions, one in London, the other in Grasmere, might have been framed to show how thinking and feeling have changed since the ‘death of God’ early last century. The landscape...
First the rainbow brought messages, later it demanded explanations. In the story of Noah it is God’s promise of an end to floods; in Greek mythology, Iris was both goddess of the rainbow and the...
Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa may be ‘the world’s most famous painting’ but almost everything about it is obscure. We don’t know precisely when it was painted, we...