What really happened at Troy?
Heinrich Schliemann had always hoped he’d find Homer’s Troy. Although he had no archaeological background to speak of, he did…
Did Radio 2 really need to give us four days of the Beatles to celebrate Abbey Road?
This Changeling Self, Radio 4’s lead drama this week, clearly ought to have gone out in August. It’s set —…
The new treasures of Pompeii
One afternoon in AD 79 an unusual cloud appeared above Vesuvius in the Bay of Naples. ‘It was raised high…
Would James Joyce have finished Ulysses without coloured pens?
The Mesopotamians wrote on clay and the ancient Chinese on ox bones and turtle shells. In Egypt, in about 1,800…
If you’re tired of hygge then you’ll like Harald Sohlberg
If you’re tired of hygge then you’ll like Harald Sohlberg. The Norwegian painter eschewed the cosy fireside for the great…
The exceptional romantic cityscapes of Cyril Mann
The little-known painter Cyril Mann (1911-80) saw a lot from his council-flat window. Beyond the parks and trees and red-brick…
![Ivory plaque of a lioness mauling a man, ivory, gold, cornelian, lapis lazuli, Nimrud, 900 BC–700 BC. [© The Trustees of the British Museum]](https://www.spectator.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/lioness_plaque.jpg?w=410&h=275&crop=1)
The Assyrians of Ashurbanipal’s time were just as into pillage and destruction as Isis
The Assyrians placed sculptures of winged human-headed bulls (lamassus) at the entrances to their capital at Nineveh, in modern Mosul,…
Tintoretto unmasked
Tintoretto was il Furioso. He was a lightning flash or a thunderbolt, a storm in La Serenissima of Renaissance Italy,…
A visionary and playful heir to Duchamp: Yves Klein at Blenheim Palace
Nothing was so interesting to Yves Klein as the void. In 1960 he leapt into it for a photograph —…
Alpacas – the latest must-have wedding accessory
Of all the window displays in Amsterdam this spring there was just one that stopped me in my tracks. I…
The buildings we knocked down in the name of ‘progress’
When the German novelist Sophie von La Roche visited Oxford Street in the 1780s she saw watchmakers and fan shops,…
Are cruise liners the solution to the housing crisis?
Looking at the sketchbook of William Whitelock Lloyd, a soldier-artist who joined a P&O liner after surviving the Anglo-Zulu War,…
The icemen cometh
You wouldn’t want to stumble upon the Scythians. Armed with battle-axes, bows and daggers, and covered in fearsome tattoos, the…
Lions' wool and other wonders of Cirencester
Everywhere you look in Cirencester there’s another animal: a cockerel, a hare, a sheep or a skulking lioness. I rather…
The repression, anger and bloodshed of our own Game of Thrones
When I took up archery it was a relatively niche sport. Then Game of Thrones came along, and everyone wanted…
