Susannah Clapp

‘Iago’ (1867)

He is not​ one of her Great Men. After all, he has no beard. Yet the 1867 portrait that Julia Margaret Cameron called ‘Iago’ is her most startling photograph. The face, captured so close up as to suggest a 21st-century candour, has the long features and brooding gaze of Frank Finlay, who played the villain to Laurence Olivier’s grimacing Moor....

When I complain​ it is sexist, the men on the door think I am having a laugh. Every week before being allowed into a theatre I have to prove I’m not dangerous by opening my bag for inspection. Meanwhile my male companion is invariably waved through – though that bulge in his pocket could be a knife.

Thanks to Hannah Carlson, I now regard this ritual as part of a widespread garment...

Two things​ you will see in Paris but not in London: the word ‘culture’ on a banner at a demo, and a major exhibition by an English artist and writer who has for half a century made the Brits roll their eyes at themselves. The events are linked by the partly British-designed Pompidou Centre. In October, staff went on strike, seeking assurance about their jobs when the building...

When​ Yevonde made the new case for colour in photography, she also made the case for women behind the camera, controlling the views. ‘Photography without women would be a sorry business,’ she wrote. Who better to advance the art and push colour into a black and white world than those who wore red lipstick and scarlet nail polish?

Born Yevonde Philone Cumbers in 1893 (John...

This year​ Claire Keegan, long esteemed, became fêted. Small Things like These has just won the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and been longlisted for the Booker. Foster, published in 2010, has been filmed as The Quiet Girl. I shall not see it, at least not for a while; the words on the page are lodged in my head. Keegan’s fiction makes most novels look too fancy; her short...