Arts feature

Munchkins and mischiefs

7 January 2017 9:00 am

Arthur Rackham shouldn’t have lived in anything as conventional as a house. It should have been a gingerbread cottage, like…

Rackham frontispiece: ‘Hey! Up the chimney, Lass! Hey after you!’, from ‘The Ingoldsby Legends, or Mirth & Marvels’

Munchkins and mischiefs

5 January 2017 3:00 pm

Arthur Rackham shouldn’t have lived in anything as conventional as a house. It should have been a gingerbread cottage, like…

‘Bolshevik’, 1920, by Boris Mikhailovich Kustodiev

Back in the USSR

29 December 2016 3:00 pm

For much of 1517 Michelangelo Buonarroti was busy quarrying marble in the mountains near Carrara. From time to time, however,…

Back in the USSR

29 December 2016 3:00 pm

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

10 December 2016 9:00 am

On 27 July 1613 a man prostrated himself in the church of San Pedro Mártir in Toledo, having first made…

Left: Maíno, 1612–14: ‘The Adoration of the Kings’ Right: ‘The Adoration of the Shepherds’

O come, let us adore him

8 December 2016 3:00 pm

On 27 July 1613 a man prostrated himself in the church of San Pedro Mártir in Toledo, having first made…

Instant gratification

3 December 2016 9:00 am

Instant photography already existed long before Edwin Land, the ingenious inventor and founder of Polaroid, went for a walk with…

Painting with light: a Polaroid shot on vintage film by photographer Alex Cad

Instant gratification

1 December 2016 3:00 pm

Instant photography already existed long before Edwin Land, the ingenious inventor and founder of Polaroid, went for a walk with…

Screen grab

26 November 2016 9:00 am

St James’s Palace. 1953. A dynamic Duke of Edinburgh is relishing a ding-dong with the antediluvian fossils of the Coronation…

Drama queen: Claire Foy as Elizabeth and Matt Smith as Prince Philip in Netflix’s ‘The Crown’

Screen grab

24 November 2016 3:00 pm

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

19 November 2016 9:00 am

‘What is man, that thou art mindful of him?’ asks the Psalmist. It’s a good question. God Himself doesn’t give…

The Elephant House at London Zoo, designed in 1964 by Casson Conder Partnership

Where the wild things are

17 November 2016 3:00 pm

‘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

12 November 2016 9:00 am

Forty years ago this month a film appeared, so prescient I wonder if its author, Paddy Chayefsky, saw the 2016…

Amusing ourselves to death: Faye Dunaway as Diana Christensen in Sidney Lumet’s ‘Network’

Death by television

10 November 2016 3:00 pm

Forty years ago this month a film appeared, so prescient I wonder if its author, Paddy Chayefsky, saw the 2016…

Contours of the mind

29 October 2016 9:00 am

In Australia, I have been told, the female pubic area is sometimes known as a ‘mapatasi’ because its triangular shape…

Contours of the mind

27 October 2016 2:00 pm

In Australia, I have been told, the female pubic area is sometimes known as a ‘mapatasi’ because its triangular shape…

Shady past

20 October 2016 2:00 pm

David Hockney: It is a kind of joke, but I really mean it when I say Caravaggio invented Hollywood lighting.…

Shady past

20 October 2016 2:00 pm

David Hockney: It is a kind of joke, but I really mean it when I say Caravaggio invented Hollywood lighting.…

Muslim magic

13 October 2016 2:00 pm

In 1402, when the Turkic conqueror Temur, better known in the West as Tamerlane, was poised to do battle with…

Jamali Maddix, Viceland’s answer to Louis Theroux

Kids’ stuff

6 October 2016 2:00 pm

When a new TV channel calls its flagship food show Fuck, That’s Delicious, we might surmise that the Reithian ideals…

American beauty

29 September 2016 1:00 pm

‘At last,’ wrote Patrick Heron, a British painter, in 1956, ‘we can see for ourselves what it is to stand…

Root and branch

22 September 2016 1:00 pm

Eventually,’ said Michelangelo Pistoletto, ‘it became a movement. In fact, I believe that arte povera was the last true movement.…

On the money

10 September 2016 9:00 am

Kublai Khan, said Marco Polo, had ‘a more extensive command of treasure than any other sovereign in the universe’. There…

Money shot: banknote from the time of Kublai Khan, 13th century

On the money

8 September 2016 1:00 pm

Kublai Khan, said Marco Polo, had ‘a more extensive command of treasure than any other sovereign in the universe’. There…

Wet dream

3 September 2016 9:00 am

Utopia dons some unlikely guises, crops up in some odd places. On the sea wall a couple in their teens…