In 1936, Francis Bacon offered some of his works to the International Surrealist Exhibition, but they were rejected as ‘not sufficiently surreal.’…

There is a picture by Rembrandt of the carcass of an ox or bull. It is variously entitled Flayed Ox, Slaughtered Ox, Carcass of Beef or Side of Beef…

Back in the Sixties, it took footage shot from the surface of the moon for the world to see itself as a single, isolated entity. People watched the…

DECEMBER 2019 – PREHISTORY In days of yore, when no one knew the difference between an epidemic and a pandemic – apart from…

Asked for her opinion regarding the coronavirus which had just appeared in China, Dame Jane Goodall, the conservationist and expert on chimpanzees,…

Davi Kopenawa is the genuine article, a shaman whose dreamworld is attuned to the wonders of the Amazon rainforest. What can he tell us about the…

In his twenties, John Constable, the great English landscape painter, fell in love with a woman called Maria Bicknell whom he had known since she was…

    When the Brexit fever was at its height, and the words ‘febrile’ and ‘torrid’ seemed to be on every pundit’s lips, along with …

    I’ve always had a lot of time for sceptics. In some cases, you had to have a lot of time. There was the one who landed up in a…

The ginger-haired Jesus, by Paul Gauguin.     As a painter, especially in his early years,…