Architecture
Public enemy
Stephen Bayley announces the launch of What’s That Thing?, The Spectator’s award for bad public art
Glasgow School of Art
I was working on the final edit of my book — a fictionalised account of the year Charles Rennie Mackintosh…
Letters
Disband Ofsted Sir: Dennis Sewell’s damning indictment of Ofsted (‘Ofsted in the dock’, 13 December) stopped short of the logical…
Texas: From cowboys to culture
Dallas has reinvented itself as a major arts destination, says Hugh Graham
A hymn to ancient and modern
The Pevsner architectural guides are around halfway through their revisions — though it is like the Forth Bridge, and soon…
Le French bashing
The popular sport has spread to France. Are things really that bad, wonders Jonathan Meades
It was a wonderful town
I picked up this book with real enthusiasm. Who cannot be entranced by those 20 years after the second world…
On the waterfront
The current redevelopment of the city’s riverside is a lost opportunity to reclaim the Thames for Londoners, says Ellis Woodman
The only way is Essex
Stephen Bayley revisits the ambitious, and for its day visionary, campus that is Essex University for its 50th birthday celebrations
Palaces for the people
Sir Winston Churchill did not invent the prefab, but on 26 March 1944 he made an important broadcast promising to…
Doubting Thomas
Esther Freud wrote dazzlingly in the first person through the eyes of a five-year-old child in her first novel, Hideous…
All too human
Alasdair Palmer reveals the monstrous egomaniac behind Michelangelo’s artistic genius
Journey’s end
Is it just me or are almost all TV documentaries completely unwatchable these days? I remember when I first started…
For the love of Cornwall
Before writing this review I spent an hour looking for my original Pevsner paperback on Cornwall, published in 1951 (the…
Rags, riches and respectability
In a grand history of the British empire — because that is what this book really is — you might…
Patience is exhausted with bankers and their bonuses: this debate won’t go away
A bouquet to Alison Kennedy, ‘governance and stewardship director’ at the Edinburgh-based pensions provider Standard Life, for leading the rebellion…
New ways to open a bottle
Chefs have a problem. Think of much of the best food you have ever eaten. Caviar, English native oysters, sashimi,…
Unmade in Chelsea
Once below a time (to quote the man himself) the bloated poet Dylan Thomas slouched back to New York’s Chelsea…
Hiding in plain sight
A building bearing testimony to the power of eternal Russia; a timeless symbol of the Russian state; a monument to…
Modern master
William Cook talks to the architect David Chipperfield, whose work has made him a star in Germany
Cubism domesticated
Over the past 45 years, there have been two distinct and divergent approaches to Art Deco. One of them —…
Criminal damage
Anyone with a passing interest in old British buildings must get angry at the horrors inflicted on our town centres…
Squires, spires and serenity
I don’t know whether Bruce Bailey, a proud Northamptonshire man, agrees with the late Sir Nikolaus Pevsner that no one…
High life
New York The trouble with driving into the city is nostalgia. Manhattan Island looms into view and it still has…
