Olivia Cole 
A Thousand Words
What is your idea of a great portrait photograph? Something that makes you stop for a second and look again. And what qualities do you most value in a subject?… Read more
Free Range
Our trip began at Farnborough, an almost eerily zen airport. A small girl of about five was being ushered through by her parents. I couldn’t help imagining the distress she’d… Read more
The staircase too scary for Bruce Willis, and other Oscar party stories
From a wedding to an awards ceremony, no self-respecting Los Angeles beano can take place without endless fixtures around the main event. The Oscars barely get a look in between… Read more
Celebrating extremes
Robert Mapplethorpe: A Season in Hell Alison Jacques Gallery, 16-18 Berners Street, London W1, until 21 November Robert Mapplethorpe’s 1985 self-portrait with little devil’s horns is one of the most… Read more
‘There is no higher visibility than this’
Olivia Cole celebrates the Venice Biennale’s role in bringing Australian artists to the world’s attention Venice gives everyone and everything the most surreal setting imaginable. Along a canal by the… Read more
Keats would be proud
Olivia Cole salutes Jane Campion’s success in bringing poetry to the big screen with Bright Star For anyone who has ever read, studied or become slightly obsessed by the English… Read more
Imagination takes flight
Tastemakers have sometimes highlighted the way in which, in particular, the work of the well-known Papunya Tula artists chimes with the ideals of Western abstraction or minimalism. But whichever way… Read more
Is Oxford voting for a celebrity or a poet?
People who wouldn’t dream of having anything so trashy as Grazia on the coffee table, who claim not to be the slightest bit interested in the state of Brad and… Read more
How to put the nation’s pupils off great art for ever
‘Bathers at Asnières’ is a dreamily double-edged impressionist painting: an idyll as tricksy as the tiny dots, instead of brushstrokes, that Seurat used to paint. Young Parisian workers are stretched… Read more
Meet the new eco-toffs: Champagne Swampies
Olivia Cole says that the row over Heathrow’s third runway has revealed that despite the credit crunch there is a resilient class of celebrities and toffs with expensive green tastes… Read more
The art world’s newest inspiration: Obama
My favourite ever line overheard at Art Basel Miami Beach, in a broad growl, is: ‘I gave my wife an unlimited budget… and da-ya-know-what, she exceeded it.’ This year, however,… Read more
Lost in translation
Five years ago in a seminal essay, Michael Billington, the critic for British newspaper the Guardian and long-term cheerleader for Australian theatre, wondered why Australian cricket gets a fairer exchange… Read more
Hippie-hippie fake
‘Yesterday’s bohemian is now today’s trendy — yesterday’s avant garde is today’s kitsch.’ says Australian filmmaker and Oz pop artist Philippe Mora. And, you might add, almost bound to be… Read more
Dancing through danger
Olivia Cole on Victoria Hislop’s second novel Married to a permanently well-lunched Englishman, Sonia Cameron, the half-Spanish heroine of Victoria Hislop’s second novel The Return, seeks escapism — first in… Read more
All at sea in Shanghai
The conquering white male, guiltily plundering, seduced by exoticism and abundance but never quite sure that he’s not just the clueless foreigner being taken for a ride: so we have… Read more
Monsters and others
Olivia Cole ‘Make somebody up’ was the instruction to the 23 contributors to Zadie Smith’s short-story anthology The Book of Other People, published to benefit the Brooklyn children’s writing charity,… Read more
A quartet of debutantes
The Great Stinkby Clare ClarkPenguin, £12.99, pp. 358, ISBN 0670915300 The Second Life of Samuel Tyneby Esi EdugyanVirago, £10.99, pp. 278, ISBN 1844081060 The Icarus Girlby Helen OyeyemiBloomsbury, £16.99, pp.… Read more
Latest blogs
- Eurovision was as hilarious as ever Rod Liddle
- Britain can now afford to send a man into space. Pity we can’t afford a proper navy Fraser Nelson
- Maria Miller on defensive against gay marriage ‘wrecking amendment’ Isabel Hardman
- The Liberal Democrats, the natural party of government? James Forsyth
- Lord Mandelson gives Miliband two big tasks Isabel Hardman
- Scotland’s 2013 Eurovision triumph Fraser Nelson
- Andrew Feldman denies calling Tory activists ‘swivel-eyed loons’ Fraser Nelson
