Museums
Ignore the activists – Humboldt’s Enlightenment project deserves celebrating
Ignore the activists, says Tristram Hunt, Alexander von Humboldt’s Enlightenment project, embodied in a flash new Berlin museum, deserves celebrating
Are our churches safe from Justin Welby?
‘Frost & Lewis’. It sounds like a programme amalgamating two of the most famous TV detectives. The former diplomat, Lord…
Museums need wonder, not wokery
The British Museum’s aim is to use its collection ‘for the benefit and education of humanity’. If that manifests itself…
The joy of short stories in these taxing times
From time to time, usually when things are quiet, the government brings on the dancing girls. David Cameron made Carol…
The online museums you’ll never want to leave
‘We don’t talk about the war.’ Yet those of my generation and older reference it daily. The coronavirus is an…
Letters: How to make a cup of tea
No defence Sir: Jon Stone (Letters, 15 February) recalls the horrors and miseries of being subjected to bombing from the…
The rise and rise of the museum cafe
The rise of the museum café
Lucian Freud insisted a forgery could be as great as the real thing. Was he right?
Perhaps we should blame Vasari. Ever since the publication of his Lives of the Artists, and to an ever-increasing extent,…
Whitby Abbey is at the heart of Britain’s spiritual and literary history
The 199 steps up to the ruins of Whitby Abbey are a pilgrimage; they always have been. And any good…
The people have not forgotten me: the exiled Empress of Iran interviewed
Somewhere in the bowels of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art is a portrait from a lost world. Its subject…
The objects that sound witchiest on paper just look sad: Spellbound reviewed
Just in front of me, visiting Spellbound at the Ashmolean last week, was a very rational boy of about seven…
A new exhibition gives us the real Tolkien – not his awful legacy
To no one’s surprise, the Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth exhibition at the Bodleian in Oxford, where J.R.R. spent so much…
The best and most extensive exhibition on Napoleon in three decades
The Musée de l’Armée at Les Invalides in Paris has a new exhibition that I believe to be the best…
The greatest French museum you’ve never heard of
Imagine a French museum that’s second only to the Louvre when it comes to paintings, with an eye-watering collection of…
The Bilbao effect
Twenty years ago I wrote of the otherwise slaveringly praised Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao: I’m in a minority of, apparently,…
The icemen cometh
You wouldn’t want to stumble upon the Scythians. Armed with battle-axes, bows and daggers, and covered in fearsome tattoos, the…
Cathedral of creation
Sometimes, it pays to rediscover what’s already under your nose. I’ve been umpteen times to the Natural History Museum but…
The treasures of Alexandria revealed: British Museum’s Sunken cities reviewed
It was not so unusual for someone to turn into a god in Egypt. It happened to the Emperor Hadrian’s…
Too much boob – not enough woman: Undressed at the V&A reviewed
The V&A is selling £35 Agent Provocateur pants. This is, of course, a business deal because Agent Provocateur — along…
Norman Sicily was a multicultural paradise – but it didn’t last long
There are lessons to be learned from the disintegration of this once majestic multicultural Norman kingdom, says Martin Gayford
Why do some museums insist on playing piped music into exhibitions?
There was a genteel brouhaha last year — leaders in the Times, letters to the Telegraph, tutting in the galleries…
Ancient Egypt’s obsession with death was in fact a preoccupation with life
The Fitzwilliam Museum is marking its bicentenary with an exhibition that takes its title from Agatha Christie: Death on the…
Tug of war over the world’s heritage
Isis’s blowing up of the Roman theatre at Palmyra should concentrate our minds: our world heritage is vulnerable. Not that…
A silky, air-conditioned introduction to Bangkok
Last time I went to Thailand, there’d been something of a misunderstanding about accommodation, and my friend and I ended…
Britain is absent from the V&A’s new Europe galleries. Are they trying to tell us something?
Before cheap flights, trains were the economical way to discover Europe and its foibles. Personally, I enjoyed the old fuss…
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