The works in this exhibition are visually, iconographically and materially diverse but, when considered together, they present a comprehensive overview of drawing in the Low Countries during a period of great political and societal change. Some, including the only known drawing by Rogier van der Weyden, one of the most influential artists of the 15th century, are so rare you are unlikely ever to see them again.
Literary criticism is a supremely occasional skill, where you have to be bold enough to operate where there aren’t any clear rules and make up your own, and decide for yourself what you think, and maybe set that beside what other cleverer people have thought. Someone else might come along and see it differently, but if you’ve made them argue with you then you’ve done something worthwhile.
Rhoda Power sailed from Newcastle to Russia in the winter of 1916. She was 27, had a degree in political science and was engaged by a prosperous industrialist in Rostov-on-Don to teach his daughter English. ‘Awakened by screams and shots’, ‘awakened by cries of “Thief” and “Murder”’, she charts the waves of violence encircling her wealthy hosts steadily and without overt political comment.
The importance of Sicily to Leonardo Sciascia’s writing can’t be overstated, but Italo Calvino perhaps put it best when he said that Sciascia was a ‘local author, rooted, who had made the universal out of those roots’. Sicily and Italy don’t have a monopoly on racketeering; the dynamics of corruption that Sciascia dramatises in his novels are in many respects the same in Westminster or Washington as in Palermo.
We require heroism of our entertainers. We want them sacrificing themselves to a certain ultimate degree of input. No one can sing this loud, and yet she does. No one can dance this hard and long, but she goes on. No one can survive being this intensely cherished, but it is we who are wrung out like sponges watching her, hearts pounding, slightly afraid of what’s next.
Now that Southwark has become desirable, the patches of neglect are placeholders for the chains and high-end outlets the landlords expect to move in and pay higher rents when some version of the Berkeley development eventually gets built. To describe this as gentrification, as regeneration, as social cleansing, is valid, but none of these terms quite captures the force of a process that’s not only hard to resist but hard to avoid participating in.
If every accusation is a confession, then the US State Department report released on 20 July, which describes Cuba as ‘the capital of 21st-century communism’, must rank as one of...
Like the hippies and punks before them, slackers were characterised as figures of generational discontent. But theirs was a low-energy refusal. They weren’t writing protest songs, or getting their kicks by offending polite society.
Pandas have good PR, but they’re not as cuddly as people think. They have powerful teeth that can chew things a lot tougher than bamboo. One conservationist described watching a panda eat an aluminium pan (and documented the aluminium nuggets that were excreted a few hours later). Though technically vegetarian, they aren’t squeamish about attacking people.
One of Willie Wilde’s favourite acts was making jokes at the expense of his famous brother: ‘Oscar was NOT a man of bad character: you could have trusted him with a woman anywhere’; ‘Thank God my vices were decent.’ And he flogged the two trunks of fine clothes Oscar had given to him, raising around £12.
When the reader of Gulliver’s Travels encounters the land of the Houyhnhnms and the Yahoos (all of whom are engaged in slave labour), they are invited to consider a question that runs through the book: what does it mean to be recognised and treated as a human being? Is the ascription of humanity a matter of observable characteristics?
Fairies are notorious shapeshifters. Their mutability has allowed them to survive, dodging censure by reinventing themselves as nature spirits, angels, birds and insects, monsters, Santa’s helpers, icons of body positivity. Spirits less skilled in glamour have been consigned to oblivion (Glycon? Sabazios?), but fairies in some shape or form have remained with us.
Project a Black Planet, the Barbican’s exhibition of the art and culture of Pan-Africa, is neither a comprehensive account of Pan-Africanism nor of the art associated with the movement; rather, the curators claim, the Pan-Africa explored here is an ‘imagined geography’. Viewers are invited to consider the way the artists on display navigated the movement’s uneasy and, at times, unstable relationship with race.
Thomas Arundel is badly in need of historical rehabilitation. The man who stands accused of spiritual tyranny over the people because he required the licensing of English Bibles played a central role in first managing and then deposing England’s most complicated royal tyrant. At a time when people were most immediately worried about arbitrary government and the possibility of civil war, Arundel sought to protect them from both.
‘I think it is the riskiest film I’ve ever made,’ Pedro Almodóvar said in a recent interview. ‘I took a whole bunch of risks, even knowing that some might not land.’ If what he means by this is that he risked making a diffuse and somewhat mannered movie, then I would say he has fallen squarely into the trap.
The military exercises its power in all areas of Pakistani society. The question that faces Pakistan today is no longer ‘Who governs Pakistan?’ It’s ‘How will the field marshal use his power?’ Asim Munir’s personal history gives some clues.
Rachel Cusk asks her readers to re-examine what they thought was settled, including, in Life of M, the way each of us relates to the very famous. The celebrity doesn’t need a proper name because she is easy to recognise. She is the avatar of everything we are conditioned to desire: beauty, wealth, Dior.
It was seven o’clock, still light. I took a photograph, zoomed the screen. On the phone the smoke looked dirtier and more yellow, but it also seemed further away. In a wider shot it looked like nothing at all; a close-up showed a dense and unpleasant pall. I scrolled between these images and checked the sky. There was no way to tell how far behind the mountain the fire was.
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