Arts feature

One of the Maunsell Forts at Red Sands near Whitstable: built during world war two as an anti-aircraft gun tower, it became the home of pirate radio in the 1960s

Wet dream

1 September 2016 1:00 pm

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

House style

27 August 2016 9:00 am

Last Sunday, I went to see two of the greatest paintings in Britain — at least in the estimation of…

At Kingston Lacy, Dorset (right): Rubens’s ‘Portrait of a Noblewoman with a Dwarf’, 1606

House style

25 August 2016 1:00 pm

Last Sunday, I went to see two of the greatest paintings in Britain — at least in the estimation of…

Out – and not proud

20 August 2016 9:00 am

‘Many people are mourning,’ said Sam West on a BBC panel show discussing the response of the arts world to…

Bob Geldof addresses the March for Europe rally, 2 July 2016

Out – and not proud

18 August 2016 1:00 pm

‘Many people are mourning,’ said Sam West on a BBC panel show discussing the response of the arts world to…

Requiem for a designer dream

12 August 2016 11:00 pm

Threnody. Dirge. Lament. Epitaph. Elegy. Wake. There are so many English terms to describe the passing of people and things…

Form, function and confusion: the Design Museum in 1989

Requiem for a designer dream

11 August 2016 1:00 pm

Threnody. Dirge. Lament. Epitaph. Elegy. Wake. There are so many English terms to describe the passing of people and things…

Visions of suburbia

6 August 2016 9:00 am

Art is aspiring; hungry; acutely aware of what it could become, and of what it could lack; longs for safety…

Visions of suburbia

4 August 2016 1:00 pm

Art is aspiring; hungry; acutely aware of what it could become, and of what it could lack; longs for safety…

Everything is illuminated

30 July 2016 9:00 am

One could honour God with prayer, of course, and build cathedrals, amass treasuries, turn choirs into stained-glass jewel boxes, carve…

Astonishing splashes of colour: historiated initial from a gradual, Entry into Jerusalem (c.1410–20), by Cristoforo Cortese

Everything is illuminated

28 July 2016 1:00 pm

One could honour God with prayer, of course, and build cathedrals, amass treasuries, turn choirs into stained-glass jewel boxes, carve…

Losing their religion

23 July 2016 9:00 am

Scriabin once suggested that the audiences for his music should be segregated according to their degree of personal enlightenment, with…

Igor Stravinsky’s body being carried through Venice to the Basilica of San Zanipolo, where, by papal dispensation, a Russian Orthodox service was held

Losing their religion

21 July 2016 1:00 pm

Scriabin once suggested that the audiences for his music should be segregated according to their degree of personal enlightenment, with…

Taking the pissoir

16 July 2016 9:00 am

You have to imagine the lines that follow in separate fonts to get the full sense of the nonsense in…

Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, multisexual kleptomaniac, scatologist and creator of Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’, c.1920

Taking the pissoir

14 July 2016 1:00 pm

You have to imagine the lines that follow in separate fonts to get the full sense of the nonsense in…

Death of the auteur

9 July 2016 9:00 am

From the Oscar winning classics of the early Seventies — The French Connection (1971) and The Exorcist (1973) — to…

Dark arts: William Friedkin working on ‘The Exorcist’, 1973

Death of the auteur

7 July 2016 1:00 pm

From the Oscar winning classics of the early Seventies — The French Connection (1971) and The Exorcist (1973) — to…

Holy visions and dustbins

2 July 2016 9:00 am

Woolworth’s spectacles. Pudding-basin haircut, rather sparse. Norfolk jacket. Pyjama cuffs below trouser legs and sleeves. Paints and brushes in an…

‘Sausage Shop’, 1951, by Stanley Spencer

Holy visions and dustbins

30 June 2016 1:00 pm

Woolworth’s spectacles. Pudding-basin haircut, rather sparse. Norfolk jacket. Pyjama cuffs below trouser legs and sleeves. Paints and brushes in an…

Show business

25 June 2016 3:00 am

Sport has never held much appeal for me, so I rarely venture into stadiums. But I do appreciate their peculiar…

Making a stand: Archibald Leitch’s drawing for Goodison Park

Show business

23 June 2016 2:00 am

Sport has never held much appeal for me, so I rarely venture into stadiums. But I do appreciate their peculiar…

Out of spirits: ‘Glory be to God’, c.1868, by Georgiana Houghton

Out of this world

16 June 2016 1:00 pm

It is London in the summer of 1871. Queen Victoria has just opened the Royal Albert Hall in memory of…

An early folly: Rushton Triangular Lodge, Northamptonshire, built in 1597 by Sir Thomas Tresham as a symbol of the Holy Trinity

These foolish things

9 June 2016 1:00 pm

No reliable statistics exist — it’s not the sort of thing you can audit — but England is surely the…

Spellbound

4 June 2016 9:00 am

A blushing James Woodall is riveted by Isabelle Huppert’s performance in Phaedra(s)

Spellbound

2 June 2016 1:00 pm

Isabelle Huppert does nothing by halves. And she doesn’t, I think, care greatly for journalists. She expects them to ask…