A museum-quality car-boot sale: V&A’s Cars reviewed
We were looking at a 1956 Fiat Multipla, a charming ergonomic marvel that predicted today’s popular MPVs. Rather grandly, I…
An unconventional biography of the visionary architect Frank Lloyd Wright
Paul Hendrickson’s previous (and very fine) book was Hemingway’s Boat, published in Britain in 2012. It was a nice conceit…
The stormy lives of Jack the Dripper and the Wife with the Knife
A stiff, invigorating breeze of revisionism is blowing through stuffy art history. Is it really true that all the valuable…
How Camilla’s grandfather helped popularise the architecture Prince Charles detests
Was the Bauhaus the most inspired art school of all time or the malignant source of an uglifying industrial culture…
Not as good as his immoral brother Eric but still wonderful: Max Gill at Ditchling reviewed
MacDonald ‘Max’ Gill (1884–1947) is less well known than his notorious brother, Eric. But was he less of a designer,…
The Statue of Liberty is a deeply sinister icon
Immigrants to the United States in the late 19th century discovered in Upper New York Bay, after a long, uncomfortable…
Is modernist architecture unhealthy?
Architects and politicians have a lot in common. Each seeks to influence the way we live, and on account of…
Modernist architecture isn’t barbarous – but the blinkered rejection of it is
When I was younger, one of my favourite books was James Stevens Curl’s The Victorian Celebration of Death. His latest…
For the man who has everything, only a space rocket will do
Today’s VHNWI wants a PRSHLS. That’s Very High Net-Worth Individual and Partially Reuseable Super Heavy Lift System. Or, in the…
Ferrari – heavy, expensive, wasteful, dangerous and addictive
Has a more beautiful machine in all of mankind’s fretful material endeavours ever been made than a ’60 Ferrari 250…
How cool is your fridge?
Mrs Thatcher once explained that she adored cleaning the fridge because, in a complicated life, it was one of the…
High wire act
‘Mid-century modern’ is the useful term popularised by Cara Greenberg’s 1984 book of that title. The United States, the civilisation…
Vital signs
Exhibit A. It is 1958 and you are barrelling down a dual carriageway; the 70 mph limit is still eight…
Why confront the ugly lie of Islamic State with a tacky fake?
There is fakery in the air. And maybe the French are done with deconstruction. A drone operated by a French…
Robert Mapplethorpe: bad boy with a camera
Robert Mapplethorpe made his reputation as a photographer in the period between the 1969 gay-bashing raid at the Stonewall Inn…
‘I enjoy the banal’: Stephen Bayley meets Martin Parr
‘I like ordinary people,’ says the extraordinary photographer Martin Parr, pushing a few high-concept smoked sprats around his plate at…
What's that thing? Britain's worst public art
There are, as adman David Ogilvy remarked, no monuments to committees. (That’s not quite true; Auguste Rodin’s ‘Burghers of Calais’…
Bernard Buffet: painter and poser
Bernard Buffet was no one’s idea of a great painter. Except, that is, Pierre Bergé and Nick Foulkes. Bergé was…
Britain is absent from the V&A’s new Europe galleries. Are they trying to tell us something?
Before cheap flights, trains were the economical way to discover Europe and its foibles. Personally, I enjoyed the old fuss…
The rise and fall of Sony
Here is a Japanese fairy tale for Christmas. An allegory of insight, opportunism and a fall from favour. It is…
The bicycle may have triumphed over the car but it’s far from perfect
It’s extraordinary that it took civilisation so very long to discover the benefits of putting little wheels on suitcases. We…
A soothing Negroni for la dolce vita
The first draft of the famous story was called ‘A Martini as Big as the Ritz’. That’s not true, but…
Ferninand Porsche: from the Beetle to the Panzer tank
The aggressive character of the famous German sports car, in a sort of sympathetic magic, often transfers itself to owner-drivers.…
The couple behind the world’s most famous chair
Peter Mandelson, in his moment of pomp, had his portrait taken by Lord Snowdon. He is sitting on a fine…
When technology was art: Cosmonauts at the Science Museum reviewed
‘The dominant narrative of space,’ I was told, in that strange language curators employ, ‘is America.’ Quite so. Kennedy stared…
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