Duncan Fallowell

Barbara Ker-Seymer – Bright Young Person in the shadows

8 July 2023 9:00 am

Though she photographed many society figures of the 1930s, Ker-Seymer lacked ambition and remains largely unknown – as she herself seems to have wanted

His own best creation

4 March 2023 9:00 am

Once a beacon at events with his sunglasses and white ponytail, the designer who revived many failing fashion houses has left nothing of himself behind

Russian escapism: Telluria, by Vladimir Sorokin, reviewed

6 August 2022 9:00 am

Vladimir Sorokin, old enough to have been banned in the Soviet Union, flourished in the post-Gorbachev spring, and he fled…

Did postmodernism pave the way for Donald Trump?

14 May 2022 9:00 am

David Shields is an American author who has decided to collate many of the questions he’s been asked in interviews…

Part Beat, part hippy, part punk: the gay life of John Giorno

8 August 2020 9:00 am

John Giorno, who died last year, was a natural acolyte: he needed a superior being to set him in motion.…

Why are musicologists so indifferent to their subjects’ love lives?

2 May 2020 9:00 am

People often say that the battle for male gay rights has been won, at least in the West, and that…

The wizard that was Warhol

29 February 2020 9:00 am

In 1983 I was sent to New York to interview Johnny Rotten and I took the opportunity to call on…

Searching for Coco on the Côte d’Azur

15 June 2019 9:00 am

Anne de Courcy, an escapee from tabloid journalism, has become a polished historian of British high society in the 20th…

Francis Bacon in front of his triptych at the Galerie Claude Bernard in the Rue des Beaux Arts, Paris in 1977

France gets a taste for Bacon

12 January 2019 9:00 am

The case of Michael Peppiatt is a curious one. He first met Francis Bacon when he was an undergraduate at…

‘The Conversation’, by Henri Matisse, 1908–1912, the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg

It is not the masterpieces that were lost, but the collectors, Natalya Semenova rights a wrong

6 October 2018 9:00 am

It is not as surprising at it sounds that two of the greatest collectors of modern art should have been…

Blue Hydrangeas (Image: Getty)

The sight of blue hydrangeas brings out the worst in Henri Cole

8 September 2018 9:00 am

This new book, from the NYRB’s publishing arm, is in a non-fiction genre I love: short entries dedicated to an…

Unplanned mafioso Naples is ‘thrilling’, according to Owen Hatherley. Credit: Getty Images

Are European cities really so much better than our own?

2 June 2018 9:00 am

Early on in his introduction of nearly 60 pages, Owen Hatherley writes: ‘I find the Britain promised by Brexiters quite…

Beyond Timbuktu

9 September 2017 9:00 am

Every so often a monster comes along. Here’s one — but a monster of fact not fiction, over 700 pages…

The writer Natalie Barney and painter Romaine Brooks in Paris c. 1915

From Auden to Wilde: a roll call of gay talent

9 April 2016 9:00 am

The Comintern was the name given to the international communist network in the Soviet era, advancing the cause wherever it…

Happy early days: Erika and Klaus in 1927

Was Klaus Mann all Thomas Mann's fault?

27 February 2016 9:00 am

Thomas Mann, despite strong homosexual emotions, had six children. The two eldest, Erika and Klaus, born in 1905 and 1906…

The Winter Palace, St Petersburg, 1840, by Ferdinand Victor Perrot (Pushkin Museum)

The man who knows all the Hermitage's secrets - and he's keeping them

10 October 2015 9:00 am

The front cover of this book describes the Hermitage as ‘the Greatest Museum in the World’. That sobriquet must go…

Machado de Assis wasn’t the Dickens of Brazil— but he is one of the greats

15 August 2015 9:00 am

The surname is pronounced ‘M’shahdo j’Asseece’. There are also two Christian names — Joaquim Maria — which are usually dispensed…

Bernard Berenson and Kenneth Clark: pen friends, not true friends

25 April 2015 9:00 am

Robert Cumming’s opening sentence is: ‘Kenneth Clark and Bernard Berenson first met in the summer of 1925.’ One is then…

Why is a fish like a bicycle? Pedro Friedeberg’s letters to Duncan Fallowell may provide a clue at last

11 April 2015 9:00 am

Duncan Fallowell on the elusive Mexican artist and man-of-letters who has been his friend and faithful correspondent over many years —  though they have never met

An ill-waged war against the war on drugs

17 January 2015 9:00 am

Since drugs became popular, there have been countless books on what to do with them. The most interesting are those…

The most romantic winter resort in Europe: Taormina, with Mount Etna in the background, by Edward Lear

The fruitcake island of Sicily and its legion of literary visitors

3 May 2014 9:00 am

At the opposite end of the Continent to ourselves, Sicily has always been an attraction for the English who, from…

William S. Burroughs was a writer – not a painter, prophet, philosopher

8 February 2014 9:00 am

William S. Burroughs lived his life in the grand transgressive tradition of Lord Byron and Oscar Wilde and, like all…

The World According to Karl, edited by Jean-Christophe Napias - review

14 September 2013 9:00 am

Every fashion era has its monster and in ours it’s Karl Lagerfeld, a man who has so emptied himself on…