Arts feature
Whatever happened to Alice?
In 1987, the art of opera changed decisively. John Adams’s opera Nixon in China was so unlike the usual run…
Acid reign
In 1988–9, British youth culture underwent the biggest revolution since the 1960s. The music was acid house, the drug: Ecstasy.…
His dark materials
Randy Newman is already struggling to keep up with himself. His dazzling new album, Dark Matter, was written before the…
His dark materials
Randy Newman is already struggling to keep up with himself. His dazzling new album, Dark Matter, was written before the…
Show up and show off
The Edinburgh Festival was founded as a response to war. The inaugural event, held in 1947, was the brainchild of…
Ivory towers
Great novels rarely make great movies, but for half a century one director has been showing all the others how…
Let there be light
If you’ve never heard the John Wilson Orchestra, it’s time to experience pure happiness. Buy their 2016 live album Gershwin…
Grain of truth
We routinely feel emotional about materials — often subliminally. Which is why new substances and techniques for manufacturing have provoked…
There will be blood
Wyndham Lewis was a painter, poet, publisher and picker of fights. No target was too grand or too trivial: sentimental…
Brief encounter
How do you follow a film like Shoah? The nine-hour Holocaust documentary, released in 1985 after 11 years of work…
Kissin in action
Is Evgeny Kissin, born in Moscow in 1971, the most famous concert pianist in the world? Probably not, if you…
Building block
Liverpool is the New York of Europe. The business district looks like old Wall Street: a miniature Lower Manhattan on…
Woman to woman
Bump to bump they stand: Mary and her cousin Elizabeth, both pregnant, both apple-cheeked and glowing as expectant mothers should…
Making waves
Hokusai wanted to paint everything, says Laura Freeman, and at 70 he was only just beginning
Making waves
The end, whenever it came, was always going to be too soon for Katsushika Hokusai. There was still so much…
Animal magnetism
Picasso had a thing for bulls. Martin Gayford talks to the artist’s friend and biographer. Sir John Richardson about a lifelong obsession
Animal magnetism
‘I frequently went to bullfights with Picasso,’ Sir John Richardson remarked, quite casually, as he showed me around the exhibition…
Dome truths
It was 50 years ago today, Sergeant Pepper taught the band to play. The result was a popular masterpiece. Thirty…
Cover stories
These days, Aubrey Powell is a genial 70-year-old who can be found most mornings having breakfast at his local Knightsbridge…
Acting up
Gemma Arterton’s new film, Their Finest, is about second world war propaganda. Her character, who is bookish and sensitive, is…
Concrete cuckoo
The Catholic Church’s Second Vatican Council provides a salutary example of a tiny ‘elite’ foisting ‘anti-elitist’ practices on the ‘non-elite’…
A woman of genius
‘Your favourite virtue?’ ‘I don’t have any: they are all boring,’ wrote the 21-year-old Camille Claudel in a Victorian album…
Hollywood goes East
It’s kind of surreal being here.’ The general sentiment, no doubt, of most people on planet Earth right now, but…
Internal affairs
Over 20 years ago I wrote about Giambattista Tiepolo in The Spectator. Shortly afterwards I went to visit Howard Hodgkin…
The odd couple
Only once did Michelangelo sign a sculpture. It was the ‘Pietà’ of 1497–1500, and he did so using an incomplete…
