Art
Letters: No, the Church of England is not planning an evangelical takeover
A church for all people Sir: I enjoyed reading Ysenda Maxtone Graham’s account of debates in the Church of England…
True, dogged likenesses
There are currently 151,000,000 photos on Instagram tagged #Dog which is 14,000,000 more than those tagged #Cat. The enormous number…
Geoffrey Clarke’s imaginative talents knew no bounds
At the height of his fame in the mid-1960s, the sculptor Geoffrey Clarke (1924–2014) was buying fast cars and flying…
What does ‘Guernica’ really symbolise?
It takes a bold author to open his book about ‘Guernica’ with a quotation from the Spanish artist Antonio Saura…
Ali Smith’s Winter is calm, cool and consoling
In 1939, Barbara Hepworth gathered her children and her chisels and fled Hampstead for Cornwall. She expected war to challenge…
A Muslim’s insights into Christianity
I’m not a critic, I’m an enthusiast. And when you are an enthusiast you need to try your best to…
A menu for the emmets
Tate St Ives is a pale 1980s block, with a fat rounded porte cochère and sea-stained walls. It is the…
Giving Tate Modern a lift
Tate Modern, badly overcrowded, has built itself a £260 million extension to spread everyone about the place more. This means…
Cool and underground
The Keeper’s House sits in the basement of Burlington House, a restaurant in disguise. It is quite different from the…
Wings of desire
Maria Sibylla Merian was a game old bird of entrepreneurial bent, with an overwhelming obsession with insects. Born in Frankfurt…
Last words
This, my 479th, is to be my last contribution as a regular columnist to The Spectator. I have written here…
The delights of Hieronymus Bosch
If you hope to inspire an appreciation of Renaissance art in your children, look to Hieronymus Bosch. Ideally, your children…
The Spectator’s notes
However wicked tax evasion is and however distasteful some tax avoidance may be, people should imagine a world without tax…
Easy to swallow
Pharmacy 2 is the reanimated child of Damien Hirst; it lives inside the Newport Street Gallery in a forsaken patch of…
Viewing the view
It’s not all picnics and cowslips. You need sense as well as sensibility to appreciate a landscape, says Mary Keen
Roaming in the gloaming
One of the epigraphs to Peter Davidson’s nocturne on Europe’s arts of twilight is from Hegel: ‘The owl of Minerva…
Samuel Palmer: from long-haired mystic to High Church Tory
In his youth, Samuel Palmer (1805–1881) painted like a Romantic poet. The moonlit field of ‘The Harvest Moon’ (1831–32) glows…
Hitler’s émigrés
German-speaking refugees dragged British culture into the 20th century. But that didn’t go down well in Stepney or Stevenage, says William Cook
High life
If cheating is the cancer of sport, losing has to be its halitosis. I stunk out the joint in Amsterdam…
Special effects
Maybe what we love about radio is the way that most of its programming allows us the luxury of staying…
Come rain or shine
‘Pray don’t talk to me about the weather, Mr Worthing,’ pleads Gwendolen in The Importance of Being Earnest. ‘Whenever people…
See no evil
Harry Mount once idolised the Kray twins. He’s since seen the error of his ways
The bitterness of Bacon
When Michael Peppiatt met Francis Bacon in 1963 to interview him for a student magazine, the artist was already well-established,…
The only art is Essex
When I went to visit Edward Bawden he vigorously denied that there were any modern painters in Essex. That may…
Songs of the blood and the sword
Douglas Murray 28 October 2017 9:00 am
Jihadi Culture might sound like a joke title for a book, like ‘Great Belgians’ or ‘Canadian excitements’. But in this…