The first words I learned in Italian were gamba di legno, or wooden leg, for which Benito Mussolini and Walt Disney are to blame: After the war, my mother, who was fluent in Italian, had been involved with a charity that provided artificial limbs for Italian amputees. And for decades thereafter,…
An essential job requirement for a government minister in a totalitarian dictatorship is a willingness to suffer endless humiliation at the hands of the supreme leader. Deng Xiaoping (1904-97) delivers a master class in the art of self-abasement, when subjected to the sadistic whims of Chairman…
Paintings are delicate things that don’t much like fire, floods, wars, or general mayhem. Velázquez's masterpiece, Las Meninas, which shows the infanta of Spain with her entourage of ladies-in-waiting, her dwarves, and her calf-size mastiff, certainly has had its share of close calls. To save it…
That aesthetic discernment can exist entirely on its own, devoid of human warmth, is demonstrated by the lives of the art connoisseurs Bernard Berenson and Kenneth Clark. As leading arbiters of taste in their day, both enjoyed all the trappings of success. Berenson, the oracle on Italian…
One of the benefits of living in a monarchy is that whenever an Englishman feels miserable he can always point to some hapless royal whose lot is worse. As the British aristocrat Richard Grenville-Temple noted back in the days of George III:
As Charles Dickens’s Child’s History of England makes plain, Charles II was not an upstanding individual: “Whenever you see his portrait, with his swarthy, ill-looking face and great nose, you may fancy him at his court in Whitehall surrounded by the worst vagabonds in the kingdom (though they were…
Whenever a French president visits Washington and White House speechwriters need to come up with something nice to say about France, Lafayette is cited as the man who came to America’s aid in its war of independence. Whether this produces the intended emotional echo in the visitor’s mind is a…
In the history of art, self-portraiture constitutes a world of its own, presenting us with moods ranging from the lighthearted to the sordid. There is sheer delight in Rubens’s painting of himself and his first wife Isabella Brant in a bower of honeysuckle bliss; acute menace when Caravaggio decks…
In the annals of villainy, Laurence Olivier’s portrayal of Richard III holds a special place: In the 1955 film version of Shakespeare’s play, Olivier’s Richard brims with malevolent energy, all the more lethal for being witty. In On Acting, his tricks-of-the-trade book from 1986, Olivier describes…
Lucian Freud (1922-2011) did not tolerate lateness, as Mick Jagger’s onetime wife Jerry Hall found out the hard way back in 1997. For four months, she had been sitting for her portrait, in which she was breast-feeding her and Jagger’s son. But being punctual was not among Ms. Hall’s virtues, and…
While the Second World War is considered the necessary war against Nazi evil, World War I is widely seen as a pointless tragedy, an impression first shaped by the British trench poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, then reinforced by Barbara Tuchman’s Guns of August (1962). That book, which…
Mad World
Damien Hirst
Oxford
The day jazz died can be pinpointed with great accuracy: It was the day Charlie Parker put his alto sax to his lips and started sounding like Woody Woodpecker on speed.
City of Laughter
One million pounds for a landscape with some sheep, painted by an amateur artist, may strike some as rather on the high side; but that was the winning bid at a recent auction at Sotheby's in London.
Copenhagen
Rules of Engagement
J.M.W. Turner
Copenhagen
Copenhagen
Nelson
The Dictators
The British Seaborne Empire
Copenhagen
The Smoking Diaries
The Stories of Hans Christian Andersen