Arts feature
Requiem for a designer dream
Threnody. Dirge. Lament. Epitaph. Elegy. Wake. There are so many English terms to describe the passing of people and things…
Visions of suburbia
Art is aspiring; hungry; acutely aware of what it could become, and of what it could lack; longs for safety…
Visions of suburbia
Art is aspiring; hungry; acutely aware of what it could become, and of what it could lack; longs for safety…
Everything is illuminated
One could honour God with prayer, of course, and build cathedrals, amass treasuries, turn choirs into stained-glass jewel boxes, carve…
Everything is illuminated
One could honour God with prayer, of course, and build cathedrals, amass treasuries, turn choirs into stained-glass jewel boxes, carve…
Losing their religion
Scriabin once suggested that the audiences for his music should be segregated according to their degree of personal enlightenment, with…
Losing their religion
Scriabin once suggested that the audiences for his music should be segregated according to their degree of personal enlightenment, with…
Taking the pissoir
You have to imagine the lines that follow in separate fonts to get the full sense of the nonsense in…
Taking the pissoir
You have to imagine the lines that follow in separate fonts to get the full sense of the nonsense in…
Death of the auteur
From the Oscar winning classics of the early Seventies — The French Connection (1971) and The Exorcist (1973) — to…
Death of the auteur
From the Oscar winning classics of the early Seventies — The French Connection (1971) and The Exorcist (1973) — to…
Holy visions and dustbins
Woolworth’s spectacles. Pudding-basin haircut, rather sparse. Norfolk jacket. Pyjama cuffs below trouser legs and sleeves. Paints and brushes in an…
Holy visions and dustbins
Woolworth’s spectacles. Pudding-basin haircut, rather sparse. Norfolk jacket. Pyjama cuffs below trouser legs and sleeves. Paints and brushes in an…
Show business
Sport has never held much appeal for me, so I rarely venture into stadiums. But I do appreciate their peculiar…
Show business
Sport has never held much appeal for me, so I rarely venture into stadiums. But I do appreciate their peculiar…
Out of this world
It is London in the summer of 1871. Queen Victoria has just opened the Royal Albert Hall in memory of…
These foolish things
No reliable statistics exist — it’s not the sort of thing you can audit — but England is surely the…
Three hours of vomit, fellatio and menstruation: Isabelle Huppert on Phaedra(s)
A blushing James Woodall is riveted by Isabelle Huppert’s performance in Phaedra(s)
Spellbound
Isabelle Huppert does nothing by halves. And she doesn’t, I think, care greatly for journalists. She expects them to ask…
Why confront the ugly lie of Islamic State with a tacky fake?
Can the beauty of Palmyra be reproduced by data-driven robots? Stephen Bayley on copies, fakes and forgeries
The great pretenders
There is fakery in the air. And maybe the French are done with deconstruction. A drone operated by a French…
Jonathan Meades on the postmodernist buildings that we must protect
Best of postmodernism: is that an oxymoron? Jonathan Meades thinks not
Gaudy! Bright! Loud! Fun!
In any epoch most of what is built is mediocre, though we may not realise it at the time because…
Meet the fans who risk death for heavy metal
We in the West may snigger at heavy metal, but in some parts of the world its practitioners face the death penalty. Karen Yossman reports
Death metal
With its loud guitar riffs and even louder fashion, heavy metal has always been ripe for ridicule. In its mid-1980s…
