Higher Ordinariness: Poor Surrey

Jonathan Meades, 23 May 2024

Surrey comes from a different time. It is, to appropriate Surreyspeak, forever a wholly unconvincing approximation of yore (1450-1600). It comes from a different place, too: so lavishly heathered, gorsed,...

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Diary: Art and Memory

Julian Barnes, 9 May 2024

We think we remember works of art rather well; and probably assume that the greater the work of art, and the more powerfully it strikes us, the more accurate our mental image of it must be. But memory...

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One way of refusing to see the difference between making a movie and talking about one is to remember that films often talk, literally and obliquely, about film. 

Read more about A Little Bit of Real Life: Writing with Godard

No Taste: Above the Altar

Charles Hope, 25 April 2024

The idea of a church as a place for the dead as much as for the living has now largely disappeared, but it was central to religious thought and practice in the Renaissance and later. The living prayed...

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At the Perimeter: On Shuvinai Ashoona

Emily LaBarge, 25 April 2024

Inuit art as we know it – though often assumed to be an ancient cultural tradition – is a product of the 20th century. Its imagery, however, is a complex fusion of old and new, of the pre-colonial...

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At the Movies: ‘The Delinquents’

Michael Wood, 25 April 2024

Rodrigo Moreno’s​ The Delinquents has been described as a heist movie and a comedy. These labels are appropriate only if every bank robbery is a heist, and if we call films comedies when we can’t...

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Where does culture come from?

Terry Eagleton, 25 April 2024

Marxism is about leisure, not labour. The only good reason for being a socialist, apart from annoying people you don’t like, is that you don’t like to work.

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Remembering the Future

Hazel V. Carby, 4 April 2024

I am reminded of the first maps I saw as a child, hanging on the walls of British classrooms. Of course, the colour that occurred most often on those maps was red, not white, a difference in surface but...

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‘Replay’ is Kruger’s term for her reworkings of the early iconic screen prints, transferred from their original formats to free-standing LED video screens. This is the Kruger blueprint: levity shot...

Read more about At the Serpentine: On Barbara Kruger

At the Movies: ‘American Fiction’

Michael Wood, 21 March 2024

The film keeps threatening to come apart, almost unable to juggle its sorrowful realism with its wild farce. It doesn’t come apart, though, and the survived threat is part of the unshakeable discomfort...

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Too Big to Shut Down: Rave On

Chal Ravens, 7 March 2024

Acid house wasn’t a genre of dance music so much as a new way of experiencing it: audiences dressed down, parties ran all night and – so dancers reported – social divisions disintegrated, helped...

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At the Pompidou: On Posy Simmonds

Susannah Clapp, 7 March 2024

Simmonds’s books and newspaper strips have been a compass for generations of British women, as sure a gauge of who and where they are as Marks and Spencer knickers.

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On the Wall

Nicholas Penny, 7 March 2024

The urge to register one’s presence, even if only with a pseudonym, is a powerful factor in the history of graffiti. It is found when some forbidden or previously inaccessible territory is being explored.

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On the Red Carpet

David Thomson, 7 March 2024

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...

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On VAR

Ben Walker, 22 February 2024

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...

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Fans and Un-Fans

Ferdinand Mount, 22 February 2024

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...

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At the Movies: ‘The Zone of Interest’

Michael Wood, 22 February 2024

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...

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