Books features
Magazine: The BiographyTuesday, 27 October 2009Helen Chase’s biography of post-punk band Magazine is in some ways a textbook example of how to do the job correctly. In fact, with its classically austere cover (designed by Malcolm Garrett, who did many record sleeves for the band) this handsome... Read more... |
Extract: More Miles than MoneySunday, 18 October 2009Most boys grow up playing Cowboys and Indians. Thing is, I never grew out of it. For as long as I can remember I’ve wanted to write my own variant on the great American road book. I pinpoint three pre-adolescent experiences that warped my mind:... Read more... |
A Wit in the Stalls: Frank JohnsonFriday, 09 October 2009
Frank Johnson, the great parliamentary sketch-writer who died in 2006, was a passionate fan of opera and ballet. While intensely admiring certain artists, he kept eye and pen sharp for his observations of cultural matters, mocking cabals of opinion-... Read more... |
Titian in LoveSunday, 27 September 2009In 1522, Jacopo Tebaldi, agent of Titian’s great patron Alfonso d’Este, paid a visit to the artist who had claimed to be too ill to work. "I have been to see Titian," he wrote to Alfonso, "who has no fever at all. He looks well, if somewhat... Read more... |
theartsdesk Q&A: Author-actor Michael PalinTuesday, 22 September 2009
Michael Palin (b 1943) has had - is having - an amazing multi-pronged career. One of the original members of the Monty Python team, he has subsequently reinvented himself as a prolific author, a film and television actor and, more recently, a hugely... Read more... |
Halfway To HollywoodTuesday, 22 September 2009This second volume of my diaries covers my life from the beginning of the 1980s to the night before I set out from the Reform Club in September 1988 on Around The World In Eighty Days, the journey that was to change my life.For me the 1980s was the... Read more... |
Under Their ThumbMonday, 21 September 2009This unassuming but highly readable memoir portrays the Rolling Stones over a period which has never much appealed to rock’s literati. When Bill German began producing his fan’s newsletter, Beggars Banquet, in 1978 while he was still at high school... Read more... |
Exclusive Art Gallery: TitianSunday, 20 September 2009With thanks to the National Gallery, the Musée du Louvre, Madrid's Prado Gallery, Naples' Capodimonte Museum and Washington's National Gallery, and to mark the publication of Mark Hudson's major new biography, Titian: The Last Days, we reproduce a... Read more... |
Titian's Bacchus and AriadneSunday, 20 September 2009
In 1519 Titian was commissioned by Alfonso d’Este, the famously irascible Duke of Ferrara, to provide the first of three paintings for a study, the so-called camerino d’alabastro or alabaster room. If the following five years of delays and... Read more... |
Appetite For Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital AgeSaturday, 19 September 2009Even with the 20-20 vision of hindsight, the failure of the major record labels to grasp the implications of the internet seems extraordinary. As Rolling Stone contributing editor Steve Knopper explains in this pacey account of corporate greed and... Read more... |
Blade Runners, Deer Hunters and Blowing the Bloody Doors OffWednesday, 09 September 2009
Michael Deeley, the veteran British producer, has a theory about how the Academy Awards are decided (and he is eminently well-placed to know, having won the Best Picture Oscar for The Deer Hunter in 1979). "There are four bases upon which the... Read more... |
The Train of Ice and Fire: Mano Negra in ColombiaWednesday, 09 September 2009"There have been some legendary rock'n'roll train rides over the years", as music journalist Nigel Williamson put it, "but there has surely never been a train ride like the one Manu Chao took across Colombia in 1993." The travellers included Manu's... Read more... |
