Museums
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
A few weeks ago, I looked out on the Cathedral of Monreale from the platform on which once stood the…
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…
The British Museum's Celtic masterpieces aren't Celtic - but they are fabulous
‘Celtic’ is a word heavily charged with meanings. It refers, among other phenomena, to a football club, a group of…
The graveyard where old Glasgow lives on
A wet walk in a Glaswegian graveyard might not be your idea of fun, but then you might not have…
Renzo Piano’s new Whitney Museum is very good news - for the Met
About six years ago the first section of the now celebrated High Line was opened in New York and made…
Rise early to see the Vatican at its best
The sun has only just risen in Rome and we are standing bleary-eyed in a short queue outside the Vatican.…
The reopened V&A Cast Courts are a fabulous spectacle of Victorian theft and reverence
The great municipal museums are products of the 19th-century imagination, evidence of lofty ambitions and cringe-making limitations. They are exact…
A fitting exit for the self-publicising Lady Warsi
At the impressive Westminster Abbey vigil to mark the centenary of the first world war on Monday night, there was…
The boom in private museums
In the past ten years museums of modern and contemporary art have proliferated around the world. New institutions have appeared…
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