Arts feature
There will be blood
Wyndham Lewis was a painter, poet, publisher and picker of fights. No target was too grand or too trivial: sentimental…
Brief encounter
How do you follow a film like Shoah? The nine-hour Holocaust documentary, released in 1985 after 11 years of work…
Kissin in action
Is Evgeny Kissin, born in Moscow in 1971, the most famous concert pianist in the world? Probably not, if you…
Building block
Liverpool is the New York of Europe. The business district looks like old Wall Street: a miniature Lower Manhattan on…
Woman to woman
Bump to bump they stand: Mary and her cousin Elizabeth, both pregnant, both apple-cheeked and glowing as expectant mothers should…
Making waves
Hokusai wanted to paint everything, says Laura Freeman, and at 70 he was only just beginning
Making waves
The end, whenever it came, was always going to be too soon for Katsushika Hokusai. There was still so much…
Animal magnetism
Picasso had a thing for bulls. Martin Gayford talks to the artist’s friend and biographer. Sir John Richardson about a lifelong obsession
Animal magnetism
‘I frequently went to bullfights with Picasso,’ Sir John Richardson remarked, quite casually, as he showed me around the exhibition…
Dome truths
It was 50 years ago today, Sergeant Pepper taught the band to play. The result was a popular masterpiece. Thirty…
Cover stories
These days, Aubrey Powell is a genial 70-year-old who can be found most mornings having breakfast at his local Knightsbridge…
Acting up
Gemma Arterton’s new film, Their Finest, is about second world war propaganda. Her character, who is bookish and sensitive, is…
Concrete cuckoo
The Catholic Church’s Second Vatican Council provides a salutary example of a tiny ‘elite’ foisting ‘anti-elitist’ practices on the ‘non-elite’…
A woman of genius
‘Your favourite virtue?’ ‘I don’t have any: they are all boring,’ wrote the 21-year-old Camille Claudel in a Victorian album…
Hollywood goes East
It’s kind of surreal being here.’ The general sentiment, no doubt, of most people on planet Earth right now, but…
Internal affairs
Over 20 years ago I wrote about Giambattista Tiepolo in The Spectator. Shortly afterwards I went to visit Howard Hodgkin…
The odd couple
Only once did Michelangelo sign a sculpture. It was the ‘Pietà’ of 1497–1500, and he did so using an incomplete…
Paradise lost
The American dream was a consumerist idyll: all of life was to be packaged, stylised, affordable and improvable. Three bedrooms,…
Paradise lost
The American dream was a consumerist idyll: all of life was to be packaged, stylised, affordable and improvable. Three bedrooms,…
From page to stage
Reading Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet is a heady experience. You not only see, hear, know her characters — you can…
From page to stage
Reading Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet is a heady experience. You not only see, hear, know her characters — you can…
Snap, crackle and pop
As you go into the new Wellcome Collection exhibition, Electricity: The Spark of Life, you might have in mind a…
Snap, crackle and pop
As you go into the new Wellcome Collection exhibition, Electricity: The Spark of Life, you might have in mind a…
Snap, crackle and pop
As you go into the new Wellcome Collection exhibition, Electricity: The Spark of Life, you might have in mind a…
Thoroughly modern Monteverdi
‘Eppur si muove’ — And yet it moves. Galileo’s defiant insistence that the Earth revolves round the Sun, his refusal…
