Architecture
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…
Taki: Mayor Bloomberg has sold New York out to the highest bidder
New York The trouble with driving into the city is nostalgia. Manhattan Island looms into view and it still has…
Adhocism, by Charles Jencks - review
Here, for time travellers, is the whack-job spirit of ’68 in distillate form, paperbound and reissued in facsimile (with some…
