The pictures suggest a before and after: the subjects are on their way somewhere. Their clothes tell us something about trends – which continued to be imported as well as self-generated – but also...

T.J. Clark’s definition of modernism draws on an old-school idea of modernity: Max Weber on ‘the disenchantment’ of a rationalised world, Georg Simmel on the ‘indifference’ of a money economy,...

When the Daily Mail launched in 1896 it boasted that, unlike its rivals, it did not carry a page of verbatim parliamentary reports. Instead, there were women’s pages, daily features, and ‘talking points’...

The unlived life​ is a great modern theme. Not reality’s disappointments, but reality itself as a form of evasion, the wrong road taken. When we read or hear the word ‘living’,...

There is no way to offset the fact that a gigantic dose of hydrocarbon wealth is being used to stage an immensely carbon-intensive spectacle, in a place that is already getting hotter faster than almost...

Carolee Schneemann worked at a remove from the central debates of 20th-century feminism – making sex films twenty years before the sex wars, kissing cats before the turn to the non-human – but as she...

Florine Stettheimer invited and deflected her categorisation as a woman artist by painting stereotypically feminine subjects with a cutting wit. Satires of beauty pageants, department store sales, bathhouses...

We live in a world, as Stuart Hall put it, in which one can be just as ‘committed’ a revolutionary as Marx or Lenin, but ‘every now and then – Saturday mornings, perhaps, just before the demonstration...

The plot summaries​ for Park Chan-wook’s Decision to Leave refer to a man being found dead at the foot of a mountain. This is correct, but it isn’t quite what it looks like on...

Frank O’Hara wasn’t a poet to write about parents, siblings and a middle-class Irish-Catholic upbringing in Grafton, Massachusetts, or his military service in the Pacific during the Second World War....

The magic lantern is a prosaic object: a tin or wooden box, fitted with a chimney, a set of lenses and a light source. But for nearly four centuries it has animated the walls of homes and theatres, first...

In the years before mass car ownership, Birmingham’s suburban workers were wholly reliant on the bus network. The landscape was denuded of the pubs, music halls and community life that defined the inner...

At the beginning​ we hear voices, part of a stand-up routine perhaps – later we learn that they’re from a television show. One of them says: ‘You’d think a man who could...

Unlike Eve, who was made from a spare rib, Lilith was made from the same clay as Adam. In Eden, Adam insisted that Lilith lie beneath him during sexual intercourse as an admission of her inferiority. She...

People don’t just leave the house in Andrea Arnold’s films. They set off, door slammed, shoving stuff into a bag, shooing children ahead of them, down the road, across a strip of urban scrubland, headed...

Ivor Gurney has had to wait almost a century for a biographer willing to recognise the curious order that can emerge from psychological disorder, the sounds composed by the unsound mind. 

The song​ we hear at the beginning of David Leitch’s film Bullet Train is the Bee Gees’ ‘Stayin’ Alive’. It’s a good song and all too relevant, but by...

The most bizarre aspect of the ‘quotation’ as we now understand it is that words uttered by King Lear when he’s mad are ascribed to Shakespeare, and that words attributed with some irony to a character...