Art
Seriously eccentric – Chaplin & Company by Mave Fellowes
Chaplin & Company is an alarming proposition for anyone with a low threshold for the cute and quirky. Its main character, Odeline Milk, is a mime artist. She is serious… Continue reading
0 Comments
Dreams and Nightmares: Europe in the twentieth century
So much abuse has been heaped on the European Union in recent years that it is easy to forget that Europe and the EU are not the same thing. Geert… Continue reading
12 Comments
What is the point of fiction if not to expand horizons?
While Ian McEwan’s recent piece in the Guardian is not expressly termed a treatise on the value of art, it is hard to see it otherwise. What is the use… Continue reading
0 Comments
The Young Van Dyck edited by Alejandro Vergara and Friso Lammertse – review
Precocious genius will never fail to impress. But it is also very hard to relate to. Aged 14, Anthony Van Dyck painted a Portrait of a Seventy-Year-Old man that looked… Continue reading
0 Comments
Roy Lichtenstein: comic genius?
Tate Modern promises that its forthcoming retrospective will showcase ‘the full scope of Roy Lichtenstein’s artistic explorations’, to which Spectator art critic Andrew Lambirth responded acidly: ‘I look forward to… Continue reading
0 Comments
Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor: beyond chemistry
Regularly voted one of the greatest American novels of the last century, Theodore Dreiser’s moralising epic An American Tragedy (1925) hasn’t aged well. Adapted for the cinema as A Place… Continue reading
0 Comments
Interview with a writer: John Ashbery
John Ashbery is recognized as one of the most eminent American poets of the twentieth-century. He also been called America’s greatest living poet today. Ashbery published his first book of… Continue reading
2 Comments
The Duchess of Cambridge, defining a portrait
Poor Kate Middleton. In the royal tradition of artistic and literary representation, what defines her at this moment in time? The creepy feature on her wardrobe statistics in February’s Vogue?… Continue reading
1 Comment
Mike Newell’s Great Expectations will leave you with great questions
You cannot have failed to learn that a new film adaptation of Great Expectations has been released today. Publicity for the film is ubiquitous: posters of Ralph Fiennes as Magwitch… Continue reading
1 Comment
My life as a connoisseur
‘Passion for freedom‘ is now holding its fourth exhibition at the Unit 24 Gallery just behind Tate Modern. The show is a visible and occasionally dazzling manifestation of an often… Continue reading
16 Comments
Review – Hawthorn and Child, by Keith Ridgeway
‘The body is a multitude of ways of coming apart’ writes Keith Ridgeway in his most recent novel Hawthorn & Child. He describes these ways. It can be beaten, broken… Continue reading
1 Comment
Thornton Wilder’s theatrics in The Cabala
I was on a date once in Atlanta, Georgia. We decided on the theatre and there was only one show playing, The Skin of Our Teeth by Thornton Wilder. After… Continue reading
2 Comments
Plein-air pleasures and the great indoors
Some say it’s the walk there that does it. The promenade down a rambling city path and through a crowd of coffee-swigging commuters that fuels the inspiration that can only… Continue reading
1 Comment
Jimmy Savile Is Innocent…
Now then, now then. How is this for the most inappropriate publicity stunt going? The Bread and Butter gallery in Islington is opening an exhibition tomorrow provocatively called ‘Jimmy Savile… Continue reading
106 Comments
The shock value of John Wilmot, earl of Rochester
‘The Maidenhead’ Have you not in a chimney seen A sullen faggot wet and green, How coyly it receives the heat, And at both ends does fume and sweat? So… Continue reading
1 CommentOutliving Ozymandias
In 1842, a wealthy heiress called Sarah Losh built a church in Wreay (rhymes with ‘near’, apparently), close to Carlisle. Coupling carvings of caterpillars with turtle gargoyles and a spattering… Continue reading
1 Comment
Richard Millet and the nihilism of multiculturalism
It’s the last day of banned book week but perhaps we should spare a thought for banned editors. An editor at Éditions Gallimard, who worked on Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly… Continue reading
3 Comments
Robert Hughes – The novelty of the shock
The real shock of the new came in 1991. It was sobering, and it was reverent, which aren’t exactly the first words one would associate with The Shock of the… Continue reading
0 Comments
Robert Hughes RIP
It has been a bad week for men of letters, with the loss of Gore Vidal a few days ago and Robert Hughes today. Gore was famous for his feuds,… Continue reading
1 Comment
Interview: Nick Makoha’s shame
“My shame was my father wasn’t there,” says Nick Makoha, the London poet who represented Uganda at the recent Poetry Parnassus. This frank vulnerability is at the core of his… Continue reading
1 Comment