Architecture
How dedicated a fascist was Le Corbusier?
The ‘revelations’, 50 years after he drowned, that Le Corbusier was a ‘fascist’ and an anti-Semite are neither fresh nor…
The Spectator declares war on bad public art
Stephen Bayley announces the launch of What’s That Thing?, The Spectator’s award for bad public art
The long ordeal of Mackintosh’s Glasgow School of Art
I was working on the final edit of my book — a fictionalised account of the year Charles Rennie Mackintosh…
Letters: Why Ofsted should be disbanded
Disband Ofsted Sir: Dennis Sewell’s damning indictment of Ofsted (‘Ofsted in the dock’, 13 December) stopped short of the logical…
Dallas, city of culture
Dallas has reinvented itself as a major arts destination, says Hugh Graham
Cambridge, showcase for modernism (and how costly it is to fix)
The Pevsner architectural guides are around halfway through their revisions — though it is like the Forth Bridge, and soon…
Le French bashing has spread to France. Are things really that bad?
The popular sport has spread to France. Are things really that bad, wonders Jonathan Meades
To call this offering a book is an abuse of language
I picked up this book with real enthusiasm. Who cannot be entranced by those 20 years after the second world…
How Londoners can reclaim the River Thames
The current redevelopment of the city’s riverside is a lost opportunity to reclaim the Thames for Londoners, says Ellis Woodman
The only way is Essex University
Stephen Bayley revisits the ambitious, and for its day visionary, campus that is Essex University for its 50th birthday celebrations
Why prefabs really were fab
Sir Winston Churchill did not invent the prefab, but on 26 March 1944 he made an important broadcast promising to…
It’s not easy for a middle-aged woman to get inside the head of a 12-year-old innkeeper’s son in 1914
Esther Freud wrote dazzlingly in the first person through the eyes of a five-year-old child in her first novel, Hideous…
Michelangelo’s vision was greater even than Shakespeare’s
Alasdair Palmer reveals the monstrous egomaniac behind Michelangelo’s artistic genius
We need more opinionated English eccentrics making documentaries like, ahem, me...
Is it just me or are almost all TV documentaries completely unwatchable these days? I remember when I first started…
The ultimate guide to Cornwall
Before writing this review I spent an hour looking for my original Pevsner paperback on Cornwall, published in 1951 (the…
A Labour MP defends the Empire – and only quotes Lenin twice
In a grand history of the British empire — because that is what this book really is — you might…
Why the bankers’ bonus debate is not going away
A bouquet to Alison Kennedy, ‘governance and stewardship director’ at the Edinburgh-based pensions provider Standard Life, for leading the rebellion…
What Quique Dacosta knows that Picasso didn’t
Chefs have a problem. Think of much of the best food you have ever eaten. Caviar, English native oysters, sashimi,…
Where artists went to drink and die
Once below a time (to quote the man himself) the bloated poet Dylan Thomas slouched back to New York’s Chelsea…
Secrets of the Kremlin
A building bearing testimony to the power of eternal Russia; a timeless symbol of the Russian state; a monument to…
Interview David Chipperfield: It is better to be fond of architecture than amazed by it
William Cook talks to the architect David Chipperfield, whose work has made him a star in Germany
A book on Art Deco that's a work of art in itself — but where's the Savoy, Claridge's and the Oxo Tower?
Over the past 45 years, there have been two distinct and divergent approaches to Art Deco. One of them —…
The men who demolished Victorian Britain
Anyone with a passing interest in old British buildings must get angry at the horrors inflicted on our town centres…
Is Northamptonshire not scenic enough to visit?
I don’t know whether Bruce Bailey, a proud Northamptonshire man, agrees with the late Sir Nikolaus Pevsner that no one…
