Kazimir Malevich was the most enigmatic and the most provocative painter of the early Soviet period. He can be seen as a pioneer of abstraction and of the minimalist works produced many years...
Tom Girtin wrote in 1958 of ‘the ubiquitous John Taylor’, but he could have had no idea how ubiquitous Taylor would turn out to be, as more and more came to be known about the 1790s. The story of his...
They made the oddest of couples, Lindemann and Churchill. A German-born bourgeois bachelor, scientist, airman, pianist, social climber, near teetotaller, non-smoker, vegetarian, buttoned-up loner...
In his 1987 autobiography, Arthur Miller tells of a conversation with a Kentucky farmer about the Holy Ghost. Pressed to give a definition of the most mysterious element in the Trinity, the...
Chiang Kai-shek celebrated his 50th birthday (by the Chinese way of counting) in October 1936. To mark the occasion, every schoolchild in the country – or in those parts not already...
Si monumentum requiris, circumspice. Even those, John Campbell suggests, who have little or no memory of Margaret Thatcher, live in a world she created; and from which there is no going back. More...
In June 1845, an odd assortment of faintly disconcerting objects was drawing large crowds to the Cosmorama in Regent Street. The exhibition catalogue was headed: ‘Vidocq, chef de la police...
This is not a long book, except in its view, which is like the view from a Sierra peak, where the omniscient author can see all the way from the Nevada desert, violet and dun, to the biblical...
Modern biographers aspire to tell all, and psychoanalysts writing the lives of psychoanalysts should be better at this than most. But there are those who may doubt the propriety of their...
His name was Franz Kafka, and he quite often went to the movies. Some such statement constitutes both the basis of Kafka Goes to the Movies and its primary impediment: the rock it has to roll up...
In what Dylan Thomas called his ‘impermanent, oscillating, ragbag character’, Welshness was a performance rather than a passion. When he talked about Wales he was talking about himself, the self that...
Robin Cook’s memoir concentrates on the first two years of the second Blair government, from his ‘demotion’ to leader of the House immediately after the 2001 general election to...
In 1865, a year after John Clare’s death in the Northampton General Lunatic Asylum, Frederick Martin, a former amanuensis of Thomas Carlyle, published the first biography of the...
If we follow the logic of Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, we could say that Rupert Murdoch is not so much a man, or a cultural force, as a...
The early photographs of Walker Evans are now so familiar that it is easy to forget how radically different they seemed at the time, and to take their subtle influence for granted, or, now that...
The possession and use of a toothbrush was a mark of the difference between us and them, gentry and peasant, or so Lady Gregory suggested when she made the remark – jocular, perhaps, and...
Aaron Barschak, who gatecrashed Prince William’s 21st birthday party last year, says the question he is most often asked is: ‘What was Camilla Parker Bowles like?’ He could do...
Returning to her aunt’s villa in Florence in 1899, after an intense but short-lived affair with Axel Munthe, Ottoline Morrell was an ideal candidate to become one of the acolytes who...