The crack in the promise of the Academy Awards is that American pictures don’t cut it any more. ‘Hollywood’ (if you are prepared to believe that kingdom still exists) doesn’t know how to deliver...

Despite the mistakes, video assistant refereeing works. A 2020 study showed that overall decision accuracy improved with the use of VAR from an already high 92.1 per cent to 98.3 per cent. So what’s...

In its modern incarnations, sport is a spontaneous thing, blowing wherever the fans fancy. Even the impulses that have transformed Britain into a nation of joggers and gym bunnies remain mysterious. They...

It’s not that the locals are in denial about what is going on in the camp. Everyone seems to have incorporated the horrors as real but ignorable aspects of regular existence. Höss and Hedwig not only...

The torture that comes with Ronnie O’Sullivan’s freakish gift is partly down to the fact that he is playing a game where the stakes have become, for most people, so low. But for the fans, the magic...

You can’t own what he shows. Clouds are common property. Phenomena such as sunsets and moonrises suspend distinctions anyway. So much in him is planetary as much as local. There are no frontiers, no...

By the 1950s Scandinavian design principles dominated British architecture schools, and were taken to be the natural model for the new towns, new housing estates and new universities. The frustrated young...

Marie Laurencin’s independence and her refusal to pander to her patrons only makes her more compelling as a ‘femme peintre’. Like Helena Rubinstein and Coco Chanel, she was ambitious and not always...

Is Bella Baxter an unruly kind of feminist? Yes, in a way, but before we make this claim we need to understand what else she is – principally an uninformed child in an adult body. 

As always in Guston, there is a sense of what cannot be shown, or has been erased, and can only be gestured towards: ropes instead of lynchings, clubs and sticks instead of beatings. But the props look...

Rock crystal’s status stemmed from its rarity and its extraordinary beauty, made even more glorious through carving and polishing. But above all it was the stone’s unparalleled clarity that provoked...

Netflix has reversed the classical publishing strategy of throwing content at the wall of public indifference in the hope something will stick. It sees a scattered public whose attention can be pinned...

Although they were designed to elevate the periphery by decentring the city, the villes nouvelles achieved the opposite effect: alienating a rapidly impoverished ring from the core. The suburban monorail...

In spite of various attempts to make Napoleon work as a biopic, the film doesn’t have a bio. It has a general of genius, something like a sports figure who is alive only in games or tournaments. 

When​ Yevonde made the new case for colour in photography, she also made the case for women behind the camera, controlling the views. Who better to advance the art and push colour into a black and white...

R.B. Kitaj’s bookishness wasn’t only a matter of literary references, which recur in his work; he also drew on the photographic reproductions that transformed art books during his lifetime, particularly...

The defeat of The Voice leaves Aboriginal culture stuck in the same queasy relationship to the white nation and its essentially European notion of history that it has been in since the early 20th century,...

One​ of the abiding mysteries in presenting music from the past is what the singers sounded like. There is no evidence for it, apart from written descriptions, all of which fall far short of telling...