The crowds and the emptiness
“In the towns and cities of northern Italy the streets have a heavy impasto of history, a composition in which everyone lives. The landscape is layered with reinvention”
A breath of fresh paint
A revival in figurative art and the changing face of portraiture
A boy’s own adventure
Privileged images: the photography of Jacques Henri Lartigue
A maestro of detail long before Leonardo
How Jan van Eyck changed the trajectory of Western art
Brandt and Moore: The gentleman and the miner
Based on the impulse to look at everything afresh, Modernist photography could not help but deliver a jumble of perspectives, on both sides of the Atlantic
Defence against the dark arts
“There’s something enticing about a belief that great men are in command of history. It is easier, perhaps, to deal with that than to deal with the more alarming possibility that the norms which underpinned post-war liberalism are fraying”
Monuments and men
“Current events would seem to suggest that there is no consensus on what “our values” might actually be. Society is more divided than at any time I can recall in my lifetime”
Practical magic
“Understanding a culture’s magic is as important as understanding its religion or science. It can bring us closer to the mindset of a people that might otherwise seem completely alien to us now”
Progress and destruction
“Innovation — it’s the reason you’re almost certainly richer than your great-grandparents, why your lighting at home is powered by electricity rather than refined lamb fat, and why your hulking great suitcase has wheels”
Dread, time and the pandemic
Søren Kierkegaard’s reflections on worry are useful reading for those in lockdown
The healing power of birdsong
The ornithologist W.H. Hudson sought wilderness in the city. It is as if he was writing for us today
Wittgenstein’s self-isolation
“Complete solitude” in a remote Norwegian village led to the most productive time of his life
Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps
John Buchan was a writer with a rich hinterland—and an affection for “shockers”
Charlie Chaplin à la Française
Louis de Funès may be France’s most beloved actor. The choice tells us a lot about those who love him
Theft And Lies In Vienna
Having stolen a Klimt masterpiece, the Nazis could only show it if they hid the Jewish identity of its subject
Getting Away With Murder
A new thriller set in late-Stalinist Soviet Union has alarmed Russian authorities
Why Is ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ the New Normal?
A psychologist and sex therapist wonders where E.L. James’s celebration of sadomasochism comes from and what it means for human relationships
The problem of Shostakovich
Does the idea of the composer covertly commenting on totalitarianism improve his music?
Mozart’s infinite riches
A single body of work, such as the piano concertos, can provide an inexhaustible spring of delight
Well-tempered tones
A celebration of Sufi sounds in Rajasthan offers much to treasure
Chords and discords
Musical excellence can blunt the edge of political disputes
That’s entertainment
‘Vast swathes of the television production community stopped working overnight. Any television show involving camera crews, studio audiences, the general public, travel, or proximity of any kind, was, at best, postponed indefinitely; at worst, cancelled outright’
Murdering reality: the spurious spies of fiction
Hollywood lacks the wit and the will to convey the complexities of the secret world
A hunger for the truth
A film about the the Holodomor’s exposure should prompt debate on the famine-denialist Walter Duranty
The lost boys of the Villa Bencistà
Jewish boys who survived the Holocaust recall their time in a charmed Italian villa
Theatre’s plague year
A delicate ecosystem has been disrupted. The effects are dire
Infectious enthusiasms
Hard times on stage—and off it
Honour and courage
Tom Stoppard’s roots and Caryl Churchill’s dystopia
Special affects
The National finds a niche in staging literary adaptations while Shakespeare returns to school in the Donmar’s Teenage Dick