Book review – photography

Hilly, wife of Kingsley Amis, in Swansea

Larkin’s misty parks and moors — in all their lacerating beauty

12 December 2015 9:00 am

When Philip Larkin went up to St John’s College, Oxford, in the early 1940s, he found himself in a world…

Waiting for Utopia

12 September 2015 9:00 am

The Soviet Union was a nation of bus stops. Cars were hard to come by, so a vast public transport…

Illusions of grandeur: Roy Strong as a Stuart king (Charles I, after Sir Anthony Van Dyck)

Fancy dress parade

1 August 2015 9:00 am

For his 75th birthday, Sir Roy Strong gave himself a personal trainer. For his 80th, he has commissioned a book…

Drummers at a graveside wear white, based on Ethiopian orthodox funeral traditions

No call a man dead til you bury him

29 November 2014 9:00 am

Death is big business in parts of the Caribbean. In the Jamaican capital of Kingston, funeral homes with their plastic…

Cecil Beaton, self-portrait, 1936

Talking pictures

20 September 2014 9:00 am

Beaton was the great inventor. Apart from inventing not only himself but his look, his voice, his persona and a…

The jilted bride

Pass the sick bag

13 September 2014 9:00 am

Charles Saatchi, the gallery owner, has created his own Chamber of Horrors in this thick, square book, ‘inspired by striking…

‘Flying Rock’

Layers of meaning

30 August 2014 9:00 am

An untitled photograph by Jerry Uelsmann from 1991 shows a rock like Magritte’s floating in the sky between an Ansel…

Seeing double

23 November 2013 9:00 am

The game that Charles Saatchi plays in The Naked Eye is to find photographs of subjects that look surprisingly like…