Museums
This war is the same as any other
‘We don’t talk about the war.’ Yet those of my generation and older reference it daily. The coronavirus is an…
Letters
No defence Sir: Jon Stone (Letters, 15 February) recalls the horrors and miseries of being subjected to bombing from the…
Tart gallery
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…
What lies beneath
It was not so unusual for someone to turn into a god in Egypt. It happened to the Emperor Hadrian’s…
A trip down Mammary Lane
The V&A is selling £35 Agent Provocateur pants. This is, of course, a business deal because Agent Provocateur — along…
The rise and fall of Sicily
There are lessons to be learned from the disintegration of this once majestic multicultural Norman kingdom, says Martin Gayford
Sound and fury
There was a genteel brouhaha last year — leaders in the Times, letters to the Telegraph, tutting in the galleries…
Old masters
The Fitzwilliam Museum is marking its bicentenary with an exhibition that takes its title from Agatha Christie: Death on the…
Finders keepers
Isis’s blowing up of the Roman theatre at Palmyra should concentrate our minds: our world heritage is vulnerable. Not that…
Bangkok
Last time I went to Thailand, there’d been something of a misunderstanding about accommodation, and my friend and I ended…
Eurovision
Before cheap flights, trains were the economical way to discover Europe and its foibles. Personally, I enjoyed the old fuss…
Melting pot
‘Celtic’ is a word heavily charged with meanings. It refers, among other phenomena, to a football club, a group of…
Glasgow
A wet walk in a Glaswegian graveyard might not be your idea of fun, but then you might not have…
Moving pictures
About six years ago the first section of the now celebrated High Line was opened in New York and made…
The Vatican
The sun has only just risen in Rome and we are standing bleary-eyed in a short queue outside the Vatican.…
