Civilisation

A revival in figurative art and the changing face of portraiture

Privileged images: the photography of Jacques Henri Lartigue

How Jan van Eyck changed the trajectory of Western art

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 way Amazon has profited from the Covid-19 crisis is simply another example of how — in just a quarter of a century — its tentacles have insidiously coiled themselves around virtually every aspect of our lives

Caroline Maclean’s Circles and Squares reads like a roll-call of the artistic great and good of the interwar years — whose enterprise stands in stark relation to the mess of their private lives

Jonathan Bate offers readers new to Wordsworth a gripping and perceptive account of a great poet in his prime — and the years in which the poet’s fame overtook a sadly diminished talent

The ornithologist W.H. Hudson sought wilderness in the city. It is as if he was writing for us today

“Complete solitude” in a remote Norwegian village led to the most productive time of his life

John Buchan was a writer with a rich hinterland—and an affection for “shockers”

A book by Coleridge published in 1830 offers useful advice for perplexed Anglicans today

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  

A single body of work, such as the piano concertos, can provide an inexhaustible spring of delight

A celebration of Sufi sounds in Rajasthan offers much to treasure

Musical excellence can blunt the edge of political disputes

Is music expressing or evoking emotion?

Hollywood lacks the wit and the will to convey the complexities of the secret world

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

Hard times on stage—and off it

Tom Stoppard’s roots and Caryl Churchill’s dystopia

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