Wolf composed around three hundred Lieder, together with mostly minor orchestral works, the most significant being the Italienische Serenade (1892), several worthy choral works, and the opera Der Corregidor...
In our own time, Grosz’s great theme – the domestic horror show of bourgeoisie – seems to have vanished as a subject, or perhaps it’s just got better at camouflage. But once you’ve seen Grosz’s...
Kaminsky bought chemistry books from bouquinistes along the Seine and taught himself to make explosives. But when a man known as Penguin (aka Marc Hamon) recruited him for the Resistance, he wasn’t interested...
The movie wears well, and is certainly better than I remembered, but time has also made it a different film, in certain ways closer to Shakespeare than it used to be or was probably meant to be. Or closer...
If ever a project has demonstrated the futility of conservation divorced from any concern with planning or social good, this is it. Yes, the original fabric of the building has been restored and ingeniously...
No American reporter had been expelled from the Reich until Thompson received a hand-delivered letter from the Gestapo that accused her of offending ‘national self-respect’, rendering them unable to...
Right up until her death in 1992 Mitchell remained committed to what she liked to call ‘AEOH’ – Abstract Expressionist Old Hat. The recent retrospective of her work, on view in Paris until 27 February,...
Motion pictures – 24 projected frames a second which gave the illusion of movement – were a wonder whose spell was cast by speed; and speed was what the slapstick cinematic chase both celebrated and...
The myth of Delius’s individualism may once have been a useful way of understanding his music. Positioning him as a man outside of his time, uninterested in and unanswerable to his surroundings, made...
Jacopo’s San Pier Maggiore altarpiece was too large and cumbersome to fit onto a single wall in its original, three-tier configuration. For almost thirty years, the panels were arranged across two walls,...
Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander is currently back in cinemas, forty years after its first release in Sweden. Both early and late on in the film, there is talk of a ‘little...
George Michael was the biggest selling musician in the world in 1988. He was 25 and seemed ready to outdo Michael Jackson, Janet Jackson, Prince and Madonna. In Freedom Uncut, Liam Gallagher describes...
In 1768, Josiah Wedgwood’s accountant reported an extraordinary event in his regular letter to the firm’s London offices. Among the details of invoices and updates on recent orders,...
Winslow Homer insisted that the subject of The Gulf Stream is ‘comprised in its title’, as if the man on the boat surrounded by sharks were indistinguishable from the great current and from the task...
Everyone who knew G.K. Chesterton loved him for his kindliness and jollity, as well as the dazzling turns of phrase and the forensic psychology of the Father Brown stories. Chesterton adapted his detective’s...
The death early in 1603 of Maria of Austria, daughter of Charles V, wife of Maximilian II and mother of Rudolf II, called for extravagant exequies. Her catafalque, erected in the monastery of...
Fashion magazines were supposed to be aspirational, concerned not with reality but a dream. And the dream echoed the culture, which meant that for most of the 20th century it was deemed best to be rich,...
Among the shadows and gleaming surfaces are the workers, concentrating fixedly. There are no types or archetypes in Chris Killip’s photographs, only the singular iteration of faces and bodies.