'Vikings: Life & Legend' at the British Museum shames first-class objects with lazy presentation
The placing of such an exhibition at the nation’s symbolic archaeological heart, the British Museum’s new Sainsbury Exhibition Gallery, affirms…
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Art & Culture
Stow your tray table – it’s time to join the Mile High Club
For most frequent travellers, gaining membership to the Mile High Club remains top of their bucket list, and with an…
ByStow your tray table – it's time to join the Mile High Club
Through cinema and popular culture, the cool and powerful have always gotten away with it – from Ralph Fiennes to…
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British politicians could learn some va-va-voom from Francois Hollande
L’AFFAIRE Politicians the world over must be wishing they were French. This isn’t an obvious choice, but it would seem…
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Beyond comic books, why are there so few wealthy people in literature?
A WEALTH OF OPPORTUNITY Something I have touched on before here: then, whimsically; now, in earnest. How does fiction deal…
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Review: La Fille du Régiment, Royal Opera House
I scored top marks with Monsieur Legris on Monday by taking him to the first night of the revival of…
ByReview: La Fille du R’giment, Royal Opera House
Melinda Hughes hears stratospheric top notes and sonorous bellowing in a hilarious spectacle of frivolity and fun I scored top…
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Is the age of the schmoozer over?
In a connectivity-obsessed society, the schmoozer – the chancer, the wide boy, the not-always-truthful – is being marginalised. The increasing…
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Soaring rent and demanding art fairs close a Mayfair gallery – but the picture isn’t all bleak
News from the art world seems to be relentlessly, thunderingly positive: record prices cried out at auction, art fairs humming…
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How art forgeries became celebrated as masterpieces
Michelangelo was twenty when he sculpted his sleeping Cupid. Freshly dug antiquities had fuelled the Renaissance, so the young-man-on-the-make ‘antiqued’…
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Soaring rent and demanding art fairs close a Mayfair gallery – but the picture isn't all bleak
Bischoff/Weiss was a prospering Mayfair Gallery until the prosperity of others caught up with them. Josh Spero talks to Rapha’lle…
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Review: Rodelinda, ENO
Still reeling from the awesome revival of Peter Grimes, venturing back to the ENO to see a brand-spanking new production…
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Why rich twentysomething women are turning to Botox
Growing numbers of cash-rich young women in their twenties are silently turning to Botox in order maintain the edge in…
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Designer Leon Max on women drivers in Saudi, Asia and shooting in The Lakes
STITCH UP Everything in China keeps getting bigger. Shanghai is an amazing metropolis that has mushroomed in the last decade…
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Why fashion illustration is no mere sketch but a form of fine art
HUNG, DRAWN AND COLLECTED ‘I’m usually there, sketching at table four, and there’s always the same woman at the next…
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Is art an asset class? We take stock
CREATIVE ACCOUNTING In order to appeal to the stock-ticker-watching generation of investors, art has been subjected to much attempted classification…
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Will the UK-Russia Year of Culture warm up frosty relations?
BEAR HUGS This year has been designated the UK-Russia Year of Culture, and its first display of delicate artistry came…
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Art14’s Global Private Museum Summit gathers super-collectors in London
As Spear’s has written before, private museums are a major modern phenomenon: collectors are putting the art they own into…
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Art14's Global Private Museum Summit gathers super-collectors in London
The summit gives Art14 heft and importance: other art fairs, to their presumed jealousy, cannot bring together so many grade-A,…
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Review: Candide at the Menier Chocolate Factory
The recent tube strike, combined with torrential rain and the temptation to chase guerrilla-style Prince concerts around London, made my…
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