Civilisation

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

‘The intimacy draws us into Blake’s world; his other-worldly figures begin to make sense in our world and its division, hypocrisy, faithlessness and faithfulness. He plumbs our depths, the worst and the best’

What to paint, how —and why

An iconic American art form is in crisis thanks to new writers pushing politically-correct storylines

Fans of Clive James cherished his poetry as much as his other accomplishments. This is an excerpt from Ian Shircore’s new biography, “So Brightly at the Last”, the first full-length study of the man and his muse

‘It was only at the beginning of the 20th century that anthropology developed from a hotchpotch of uncoordinated, pseudo-scientific speculations into a set of separate but interlinked disciplines’

Fans of George Eliot are celebrating her bicentenary

When a gossip columnist criticised Thackeray, Dickens weighed in to savage his rival

A Florence exhibition celebrates one of the most influential artists you’ve never heard of

Louis de Funès may be France’s most beloved actor. The choice tells us a lot about those who love him

Having stolen a Klimt masterpiece, the Nazis could only show it if they hid the Jewish identity of its subject

A new thriller set in late-Stalinist Soviet Union has alarmed Russian authorities

A psychologist and sex therapist wonders where E.L. James’s celebration of sadomasochism comes from and what it means for human relationships  

Before his journey into atonality, Schoenberg composed the surprisingly accessible “Verklärte Nacht”

Schumann’s setting of Faust is an aesthetic and spiritual triumph—and can truly be called heavenly

Which finale for Beethoven’s Op 130 should you pick— cheerful sonata-rondo or a fugue like no other?

Music stirs our emotions more than anything we can see. But visual notation is alluring too

A film about the the Holodomor’s exposure should prompt debate on the famine-denialist Walter Duranty

Jewish boys who survived the Holocaust recall their time in a charmed Italian villa

Anti-Christian bile may be inventive, but it stems from dangerous misunderstandings

Can society stand by and allow the technology that allows people to simulate sex with their neighbour?

The National finds a niche in staging literary adaptations while Shakespeare returns to school in the Donmar’s Teenage Dick

Two dramas of gender tension are re-explored for the era of #metoo by the RSC

A play based on the unfinished The Watsons has a familiar setting but takes a turn into existential crisis

Why modernise old plays when their message is already topical?