Arts feature
What’s the point of Unesco?
The FIM-92 Stinger missile is not a subtle weapon. An anti-aircraft rocket, capable of launching a high-explosive ‘fire and forget’…
The Victorian Hieronymus Bosch
No one paints fairyland like Richard Dadd (1817-86). In ‘The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke’, 1855-64, he reveals a teeming congregation of…
Three cheers for Britain’s most unabashedly elitist school
As we ponder the ups and downs of our sporting record this summer, it might be worth noting our unquestioned…
Artists vs the Odyssey
It’s a noble story of one man struggling against monstrous odds, valiantly captaining his crew while trying to avoid being…
Meet the last original punk still playing punk
It’s 50 years since an assortment of scruffy youths from the leafy suburb of Bromley, the grimy streets of Finsbury…
The uprising against ugly cities
Arriving in Oslo, the Barcode District is unavoidable. It is so named because its blocks are laid out like dominos…
The problem with ‘queer art’
In 1911 Duncan Grant’s ‘Bathing’ went on display as part of a design scheme for the dining room of the…
Three cheers for the new illustration museum
In the artistic pecking order, illustration long languished behind what were seen as the fine arts, even though it was…
The art of resurrecting forgotten artists
A retired priest in North Wales told me that after the war he had been asked by Billy Butlin to…
How the office has come to haunt us
Should we hop on a call? Let’s touch base. Let’s take this offline. Let’s circle back to your last slide…
Derek Jacobi on playing Lucian Freud
Lucian Freud almost had a second career in the cinema. He acted as an extra in a couple of films…
Peter Shaffer should be up there with the greats
Commercial success has a way of corroding critical regard. The more popular a playwright becomes, the more the critical establishment…
How Winston Churchill painted himself out of the darkness
At Chartwell, Sir Winston Churchill’s home of 42 years, now owned by the National Trust, lies his painting studio. Reached…
The art of flowers
Multi-sensory exhibitions are old hat, but in the case of In Bloom – How Plants Changed Our World at Oxford’s…
The dirty secrets of the Royal Festival Hall
The Festival of Britain – that much mythologised moment of national renewal – is wheeled out every time the country…
The genius of Zurbaran – and why he vanished
A pious Caravaggio JASPREET SINGH BOPARAI The Spanish painter Francisco de Zurbaran is sometimes thought of as a pious equivalent…
In defence of museum charges
It occurs to me only now that I might have spent far too much time in France. Indeed, so familiar…
The truth about artists’ optical aids
The first thing you see on entering this major new Viennese exhibition is not one of Canaletto and his nephew…
The art of Schiaparelli
It’s a great shame that Elsa Schiaparelli is less widely known than her rival Chanel. Perhaps that’s down to how…
Ovid puts today’s radicals to shame
It’s a crisp afternoon, and in a darkened room in central Amsterdam a woman is being smothered in snakes. Projected…
Meet the world’s finest string quartet
Once upon a time in communist Hungary – 1975, in fact – four students at the Liszt Academy decided to…
The art of ageing
More than 30 contemporary artists have contributed to the Wellcome Collection’s latest exhibition, which asks what it’s like to age…
‘I didn’t expect to love Wagner’
By the end of Siegfried, the third opera in Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, the king of the gods is…
The genius of John Vanbrugh
Van’s genius, without Thought or Lecture, Is hugely turn’d to Architecture. Jonathan Swift’s dismissive jest has never been forgotten. It…
The art of conspiracy
If you lived anywhere near Kilburn half a decade ago, you might have noticed the messages one of our neighbours…
