More from Arts
Entirely pointless and extremely pleasant: House Flipper 2 reviewed
Grade: B+ Most video games challenge the player’s problem-solving skills, reaction time or hand-eye co-ordination. But a handful of them…
Has all the charisma of Chernobyl: Manchester’s Aviva Studios reviewed
There is a (possibly apocryphal) story about William Morris, where he spends most of his time in Paris inside the…
Why intellectuals love Disney
This month marks the 100th anniversary of Walt Disney’s company. The first cartoons it was founded to produce – the…
Embarrassing bodies
While looking at Claudette Johnson’s splendid exhibition Presence at the Courtauld Gallery, I kept trying to pin down an elusive…
Ireland’s most polite bank robber
There should really be a special word for it: that vicarious fragility you feel when hearing of a minor decision…
Renaissance woman
In 1957, when my dear godmother, the Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava (1941-2020), was 16, she began her diary. The…
Top cat
If there’s one thing the internet knows, it’s that cats sell. The Scottish painter Elizabeth Blackadder, who died in 2021…
Child’s play
One of the annoying things about too many contemporary museums is that, having ditched old-fashioned closely typed descriptive labels and…
A seasonal folly
As I sat down at this year’s Serpentine Pavilion, I overheard a curious exchange. ‘You mustn’t create art within art,’…
Home truths
Can we know an artist by their house, asks Laura Freeman
Bring up the bodies
Margaret Mitchell on the ethics of museums of anatomical specimens
‘I have uncancelled myself’
David Starkey’s commentary on the Queen’s funeral on GB News was generally agreed to be the best of all the…
The war on the audience
Lloyd Evans bemoans theatre’s new hostility towards paying punters
I may destroy you
One day in October 1966 I came home from school and found a large man stripped to the waist, attacking…
Pulling on the heart strings
Advance ticket sales for My Neighbour Totoro, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s current production running till mid-January, beat all Barbican box-office…
Bring me my Spear
Where do you see paintings by Ruskin Spear (1911–90)? In the salerooms mostly, because his work in public collections is…
Brought to book
‘This is not a book,’ is the first line of Paul Gauguin’s final memoir, Avant et Après, written on Hiva…
Last post
It’s the thin end of the wedge, the slippery slope, the beginning of the end of a civilised Christmas. It…
Wain’s world
Before Tom Kitten, before Felix the Cat, before Thomas ‘Tom’ Cat, Sylvester James Pussycat Sr, Top Cat and Fat Freddy’s…
An honorary Frenchman
When the Courtauld Gallery’s impressionist pictures were shown at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris in 2019, the Parisian public…
