Chinatown – that late masterpiece of film noir – could never be made now
In one of the most frequently quoted lines of post-war European cinema, a character in the 1976 Wim Wenders film…
The dark past of the pioneering photographer Eadweard Muybridge
A distinctive pattern of horizontal and vertical lines appears in the background of many of Eadweard Muybridge’s best-known photographs, giving…
Washed up in Istanbul: 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World, by Elif Shafak, reviewed
Elif Shafak once described Istanbul as a set of matryoshka dolls: a place where anything was possible. As with much…
The short, happy life of the long playing record
On 19 June 1948, the modern LP was unveiled at a press conference by the Columbia Records president Ted Wallerstein,…
Australian letters
What have we learned in 2,074 years? Sir: “The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt…
A real-life Bluebeard: on the track of France’s most notorious serial killer
From Colette to Rudyard Kipling, celebrities flocked for front-row seats at the 1921 trial of Henri Landru, the notorious ‘lonely…
Baron Haussmann: the man who set Paris straight
Rupert Christiansen’s City of Light opens on the evening of 5 January 1875, with the inauguration of Paris’s new opera…
![[Credit: Julie Edwards]](https://www.spectator.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Mark_Kermode.jpg?w=410&h=275&crop=1)
Mark Kermode: I longed to be a pop star
In the 1970s, when Mark Kermode first picked up an instrument, the UK record business was a very different place.…
Ted Lewis: the great British crime writer you’ve never heard of
If you search Google Images for Ted Lewis, the results show an American jazz-age band-leader in a battered top hat,…
