Arts feature
Munchkins and mischiefs
Arthur Rackham shouldn’t have lived in anything as conventional as a house. It should have been a gingerbread cottage, like…
Munchkins and mischiefs
Arthur Rackham shouldn’t have lived in anything as conventional as a house. It should have been a gingerbread cottage, like…
Back in the USSR
For much of 1517 Michelangelo Buonarroti was busy quarrying marble in the mountains near Carrara. From time to time, however,…
Back in the USSR
For much of 1517 Michelangelo Buonarroti was busy quarrying marble in the mountains near Carrara. From time to time, however,…
O come, let us adore him
On 27 July 1613 a man prostrated himself in the church of San Pedro Mártir in Toledo, having first made…
O come, let us adore him
On 27 July 1613 a man prostrated himself in the church of San Pedro Mártir in Toledo, having first made…
Instant gratification
Instant photography already existed long before Edwin Land, the ingenious inventor and founder of Polaroid, went for a walk with…
Instant gratification
Instant photography already existed long before Edwin Land, the ingenious inventor and founder of Polaroid, went for a walk with…
Screen grab
St James’s Palace. 1953. A dynamic Duke of Edinburgh is relishing a ding-dong with the antediluvian fossils of the Coronation…
Screen grab
St James’s Palace. 1953. A dynamic Duke of Edinburgh is relishing a ding-dong with the antediluvian fossils of the Coronation…
Where the wild things are
‘What is man, that thou art mindful of him?’ asks the Psalmist. It’s a good question. God Himself doesn’t give…
Where the wild things are
‘What is man, that thou art mindful of him?’ asks the Psalmist. It’s a good question. God Himself doesn’t give…
Death by television
Forty years ago this month a film appeared, so prescient I wonder if its author, Paddy Chayefsky, saw the 2016…
Death by television
Forty years ago this month a film appeared, so prescient I wonder if its author, Paddy Chayefsky, saw the 2016…
Contours of the mind
In Australia, I have been told, the female pubic area is sometimes known as a ‘mapatasi’ because its triangular shape…
Contours of the mind
In Australia, I have been told, the female pubic area is sometimes known as a ‘mapatasi’ because its triangular shape…
Shady past
David Hockney: It is a kind of joke, but I really mean it when I say Caravaggio invented Hollywood lighting.…
Shady past
David Hockney: It is a kind of joke, but I really mean it when I say Caravaggio invented Hollywood lighting.…
Muslim magic
In 1402, when the Turkic conqueror Temur, better known in the West as Tamerlane, was poised to do battle with…
Kids’ stuff
When a new TV channel calls its flagship food show Fuck, That’s Delicious, we might surmise that the Reithian ideals…
American beauty
‘At last,’ wrote Patrick Heron, a British painter, in 1956, ‘we can see for ourselves what it is to stand…
Root and branch
Eventually,’ said Michelangelo Pistoletto, ‘it became a movement. In fact, I believe that arte povera was the last true movement.…
On the money
Kublai Khan, said Marco Polo, had ‘a more extensive command of treasure than any other sovereign in the universe’. There…
On the money
Kublai Khan, said Marco Polo, had ‘a more extensive command of treasure than any other sovereign in the universe’. There…
Wet dream
Utopia dons some unlikely guises, crops up in some odd places. On the sea wall a couple in their teens…
