Art
Musician’s notebook
My mother died earlier this year aged 85. She left me her old pianola. These were popular in the 1920s…
Putting on the glitz
From quartz to quince: Daisy Dunn on the art and science of Fabergé
The whole picture
There’s an intriguing conversation on YouTube between Mark Carney, former governor of the Bank of England, and the artist Damien…
Sale of the century
In my bedroom there is a small lidded laundry basket. It was designed by Geoffrey Lusty for Lloyd Loom, a…
The political power of Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown
There is a rather sweet moment in the middle of each Roy ‘Chubby’ Brown show where, after some magnificently obscene…
The art of selling vaccines
I was bemused when I first saw the photograph of spaced-out chairs and vaccination booths in the Turbine Hall of the…
Stitched up
The Royal Academy, a witch-hunt and me
Bohemian rhapsody
Rosie Millard is transported to the Impasse Ronsin, a tiny, squalid cul de sac in Paris’s 15th arrondissement that was once the centre of the modern-art world
High life
New York I hope this is my last week in the Bagel. I plan to fly first to Switzerland and…
The art of government
What politicians’ paintings say about them
The great image-maker
‘Holbein redeemed a whole era for us from oblivion,’ remarks the author of a trilogy of novels set at Henry…
A natural sensualist
Charm is a weasel word; it can evoke the superficial and insincere, and engender suspicion and mistrust. But charm in…
Cross purposes
Two millennia ago, in the outer reaches of the empire, the Romans performed a routine execution of a Galilean rebel.…
Barometer
State of the art Graffiti on Edvard Munch’s first version of ‘The Scream’ was revealed to be the work of…
Portrait of the artist as a young woman
One of Barack Obama’s favourite books of 2020, Raven Leilani’s debut comes acclaimed by a literary Who’s Who that includes…
Epic of gossip
Staying with Peregrine Eliot (later 10th Earl of St Germans) at Port Eliot in Cornwall, Lucian Freud remembered that the…
A magnificent way to topple a slave trader
I couldn’t disagree more with Sir Keir Starmer (it was ‘completely wrong,’ ‘it shouldn’t have been done in that way’)…
All about Eve
On a winter’s night an artist of moderately exalted reputation and in lateish middle age journeys across London, away from…
Capturing the mood of the English landscape: the genius of John Nash
‘If I wanted to make a foreigner understand the mood of a typical English landscape,’ the art critic Eric Newton…
In praise of cultural elitism
At present we have a series of ‘culture wars’ over a wide range of issues — race, gender, sexuality, power…
The many faces of William ‘Slasher’ Blake
‘Imagination is my world.’ So wrote William Blake. His was a world of ‘historical inventions’. Nelson and Lucifer, Pitt and…
Why did Mrs Lowry hate her son’s paintings?
‘I often wonder what artists are for nowadays, what with photography and a thousand and one processes by which you…
Let’s choose our politicians by random selection
Athens Standing right below the Acropolis, where pure democracy began because public officials were elected by lot, I try to…
A historical whodunnit that lets you into a forgotten world: The Paston Treasure reviewed
In 1675 Lady Bedingfield wrote to Robert Paston, first Earl of Yarmouth. Never, she exclaimed, had she seen anything so…
The sacred chickens that ruled the roost in ancient Rome
Even the most cursory glance at the classical period reveals the central place that birds played in the religious and…
