Moby Dick

With the all-encompassing model of Moby-Dick behind him, Hoare presents us with a vast and billowing medley of marinaria

Spirits from the vasty deep…

29 July 2017 9:00 am

‘The sea defines us, connects us, separates us,’ Philip Hoare has written. His prize-winning Leviathan, then a collection of essays…

White glazed bowl, Shunzhi-Kangxi period, Qing dynasty, 1650–70

The perils of porcelain – and the pleasures of Edmund de Waal

19 September 2015 8:00 am

A.S. Byatt on the dark, deadly secrets lurking beneath a calm, white surface

Titanic: Orson Welles as Falstaff in ‘Chimes at Midnight’ (1966)

Don’t believe Orson Welles, says his biographer Simon Callow — especially when he calls himself a failure

9 May 2015 9:00 am

Orson Welles would have been 100 this month. When he died in 1985, aged 70, the wonder was that he…