Towards the end of his Diaries, Kenneth Tynan complains that the older he gets, the more estranged he feels from his glamorous persona. In a sense, this is a rift that still exists today. Tynan’s posthumous reputation grows ever more glorious with each passing year, yet if you bother to read anything he wrote —
It will be interesting to see if next week’s full-scale Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957) exhibition at Olympia will help, as previous Olympia shows have done, to cement the artist’s reviving reputation. Certainly the timing is good in relation to last month’s scholarly symposium and the excellent recent exhibition concentrating on his works on paper, both at
Can I tell you about my latest adventures? Oh, can I? Can I? OK, well I’ve been making a TV documentary for Channel 4 and, en route, I met the greatest concentration of Spectator readers I’ve ever encountered. Why am I so totally unsurprised to discover that yer typical Speccie reader spends his February in
Michelangelo Merisi (1571–1610), called Caravaggio after his place of birth, has become something of a mythical figure in the half-century or so since his reputation was rescued from obscurity. Today he is celebrated as the great precursor of realism, the archetypal bohemian artist, and the prototype genius who behaved badly and died young. Caravaggio is
