In my Catholic girlhood she was everywhere, perched up on ledges and in niches like a CCTV camera, with her painted mouth and her painted eyes of policeman blue. She was, her litany stated,...
Ernst Cassirer began his eclectic, productive and distinguished career as a philosopher of science, but turned to the study of culture apparently after discovering the Warburg Library in Hamburg,...
It is fashionable not to be interested in Jade Goody. Public commentators who seem eager to be done with her have, in the last few weeks, published a succession of irritated articles decrying...
The late Bernard Crick, who had a fine and memorable funeral in Edinburgh the other day, left a legacy of sharp opinions behind him. Among the least popular was his opinion of the British...
Inspired provocateurs during May 1968 in Paris, the Situationists are now the stuff of legend: one of those rare avant-gardes whose art and politics were not only radical but also forged together...
What do we remember about Cornelius Cardew? That he was a brilliant avant-garde composer who pioneered free improvisation and led a Scratch Orchestra of musicians and artists; that his father was...
By the time Friedrich Engels arrived in England in the winter of 1842, the country already had a class warrior of its own. One of Engels’s new neighbours in downtown Manchester had spent...
The great debate about ‘The Two Cultures’ divided the arts and sciences in Cambridge, and the intellectual pages of Britain, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but is now hardly...
Physics became ‘modern’ at breakneck speed. Only 20 years separated Einstein’s formulation of special relativity, in 1905, and the development of quantum mechanics in 1925-26....
The first film Andrei Tarkovsky shot outside the Soviet Union was Nostalghia – spelled that way because ‘nostalgia’ is too weak an equivalent for the Russian word, the Russian...
The media called for her head, the Chicago Tribune describing her as a ‘wrinkled, ugly Russian woman, who owns no god, has no religion, would kill all rulers, overthrow all laws, and who inspired McKinley’s...
What is the best case that can be made for Maurice Bowra? In his day, and it was a long day, he was the most celebrated don in Oxford, and therefore in England. Born in 1898, he became a fellow...
One of the most appealing things about Susan Sontag was that she didn’t ask to be liked. Other postwar American writers who cut the same sort of public figure pleaded with you to love their...
Brian McGuinness has edited and compiled many collections of writings by Wittgenstein and about him, and his 1988 biography, reissued a few years ago as Young Ludwig, as well as being a...
The Casa Malaparte, where Jean-Luc Godard shot Le Mépris, was built by the formerly Fascist, soon-to-be Communist writer and journalist Curzio Malaparte in the late 1930s. It stands, or...
‘On or about December 1910,’ Virginia Woolf noted, ‘human character changed.’ It was hard in or about March 1977 in Barcelona not to feel that human character had changed...
1 January, Yorkshire. A grey dark day and raining still, as it has been for the last week. Around four it eases off and we walk up by the lake. The waterfall at the top of the village is...
Ellen Terry was the youngest daughter of two touring players, and began her own stage career at the age of six. Ten years later, she married a painter three times her age; they separated within...