Victor Hugo
‘Death is a very poor painter’: the 19th-century craze for plaster casts
Bourgeois homes in the early 19th century became ‘virtual museums of death’, with models of heroes jostling replicas of the hands and feet of lost loved ones
Wonderfully intimate: The Drawings of Victor Hugo, at the RA, reviewed
You feel so close to Victor Hugo in this exhibition. It’s as if you are at his elbow while he…
Another mistress for Victor Hugo: Célina, by Catherine Axelrad, reviewed
A young chambermaid joins the Hugo household in Guernsey and soon finds herself summoned at night to her master’s adjoining bedroom
A high-end car-boot sale of the unconscious: Colnaghi’s Dreamsongs reviewed
In 1772 the 15-year-old Mozart wrote a one-act opera set, like The Magic Flute, in a dream world. Il sogno…
The latest astonishing achievement from the creators of War Horse
The Twilight Zone, an American TV show from the early 1960s, reinvented the ghost story for the age of space…
Nature beats nurture nearly every time
I’ve been doing some thinking recently about the findings of behavioural geneticists and their implications for education policy. For instance,…
Rigoletto in a gentleman's club
So it’s farewell to the fedoras and adieu to the jukebox. After 32 years of service, Jonathan Miller’s Little Italy…
