Design
How the railways shaped modern culture
Cue track seven of Frank Sinatra’s 1957 album Only the Lonely and you can hear Ol’ Blue Eyes pretending to…
The architects redesigning death
Unesco doesn’t hand out world-heritage status to absences, but if it did, there would be memorials all over the western…
The best radio at the moment is on the BBC World Service
Online viewings of Conclave increased threefold following the death of Pope Francis last month. At least some of the traffic…
A dreamy, if overly ambitious show: Silk Roads, at the British Museum, reviewed
Towards the end of the British Museum’s Silk Roads show, there is a selection of treasures found in England. Among…
How French absolutism powered a techno-progressive revolution
The Enlightenment is back. Despite the best efforts of the past decade of handwringing about cultural imperialism and wailing over…
William Morris’s debt to Islam
When William Morris was born in Walthamstow, in 1834, it was little more than a clump of marshland at the…
At Japan House humanity has arrived at the perfect future: food for ogling, not eating
There is a popular Japanese television show that features a segment called ‘Candy Or Not Candy?’. Contestants are presented with…
Immersive and spectacular: Piet Oudolf’s new borders at RHS Wisley reviewed
Piet Oudolf’s long borders at Wisley were worn out. The famous designer had in fact become a bit embarrassed by…
The craft renaissance
As long ago as the 1960s, the poet Edward James was worried that traditional crafts were dying out. Having frittered…
How flabby our ideas of draughtsmanship have become
The term drawing is a broad umbrella, so in an exhibition of 120 works it helps to outline some distinctions.…
A feast for the eyes
Jonathan Meades on the art of menus
Last post
It’s the thin end of the wedge, the slippery slope, the beginning of the end of a civilised Christmas. It…
High Jencks
An editor once told me: always look at the loos. It was remarkable, she said, how many grand cultural projets,…
Vital signs
Laura Gascoigne meets Margaret Calvert, the designer who dragged British signposting into the modern era
A world apart
Plexiglass bubbles hover over diners’ heads in restaurants. Plastic pods, spaced six feet apart, separate weightlifters in gyms. Partitions of…
Public art
On his lockdown rambles, Christopher Howse finds beauty and solace in London’s street furniture
Floor show
Sophie Haigney on the weird and wonderful world of hotel carpets
Putting us in the picture
on the history, power and beauty of infographics
Enchanting – but don’t fall for the mummified rubber duck in the gift shop: Tutankhamun reviewed
Like Elton John, though less ravaged, Tutankhamun’s treasures are on their final world tour. Soon these 150 artefacts will return…
Meet Congo, the Leonardo of chimps, whose paintings sell for £14,500
Three million years ago one of our ancestors, Australopithecus africanus, picked up a pebble and took it home to its…
A museum-quality car-boot sale: V&A’s Cars reviewed
We were looking at a 1956 Fiat Multipla, a charming ergonomic marvel that predicted today’s popular MPVs. Rather grandly, I…
Geoff Dyer on the poetry of motels
It’s to be expected. You take photographs in order to document things — Paris in the case of Eugène Atget…
Toy theatres on the stage: the set designs of Maurice Sendak
I must have seen hundreds of opera productions in my time. Out of these, hardly any made a lasting impression…
How plastic saved the elephant and tortoise
Plastics — even venerable, historically eloquent plastics — hardly draw the eye. As this show’s insightful accompanying publication (a snip…
My ringside seat on the Mary Quant revolution
I think I probably qualify as the oldest fashion editor in the world, because in spite of my advanced age…
