Art

The stone called sardonyx looks a lot more fragile than it actually is. It’s luminous like glass, but hard like steel, which explains why so much of it has survived from ancient times. Fame being a relative word, one might describe Medusa’s Gaze: The Extraordinary Journey of the Tazza Farnese by Marina Belozerskaya as a biography of the most famous sardonyx object in the world, the Tazza Farnese, an ancient libation bowl made to hold offerings to the gods. At least one of the many people who inherited it aimed to change that function. Around the time Romanos II, son of Constantine VII, was ruler over Byzantium, someone drilled through

For the first time in years, I thought of Tony Hancock. In the ‘Blood Donor’ episode of Hancock’s Half Hour, Hancock exits a doctors’ surgery singing the words ‘coughs and sneezes spread diseases, catch the germs in your handkerchief’ to the tune of Deutschland, Deutschland Ueber Alles. I have only seen this clip once or twice, but evidently it made a lasting impression because there it was, in my mind’s ear, on being confronted by a 1940s anti-flu poster at the British Library’s propaganda exhibition. Propaganda: Power and Persuasion features more persuasion than power. Goebbels and Uncle Sam are represented, but do not dominate. Indeed, the curators challenge the notion that propaganda

As ever, the Spectator carries some splendid and erudite book reviews this week. There are contributions from stellar writers and thinkers such as Margaret MacMillan, Susan Hill, Alexander Chancellor and John Sutherland. Here is a selection. Margaret MacMillan is captivated by Edwardian Opulence: British Art at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century, a ‘lovely lush book’ edited by Angus Trumble. But, even as she peruses the glorious pictures and accompanying essays, her mind cannot escape the horrors of what the painters had overlooked and what was to come: ‘The Edwardian nostalgia, well-illustrated here, for an older world was rather like the passion for organic farming and the slow food movement

The best way to weather the heat wave is to head for the shade with a copy of the new issue of the Spectator, in which you will you find some diverting book reviews to while away an hour or two. Here is a selection: Philip Hensher treads carefully around Winston Churchill’s imperialism, the subject of Lawrence James’ Churchill and Empire: Portrait of an Imperialist. Hensher writes: ‘It is important for historians to make an effort to understand individuals by the standards of their own day, and not ours. There is a dismal school that finds it rewarding to debate whether Napoleon was homophobic or not, but for the most

Clive James was a recurring presence in last weekend’s literary press. There was, I regret to say, a valedictory feel to the coverage. Robert McCrum, of the Guardian, was not so much suggestive as openly morbid: ‘If word of his death has been exaggerated, there’s no question, on meeting him, that he’s into injury time, with a nagging cough that punctuates our conversation.’ If those words and others like them made little impact on the reader, then the photograph of James that illustrates McCrum’s interview might. Old age looks no fun; serious illness even less so. But, James’ spirit does not seem to have been shaken by the indignities visited upon

So much abuse has been heaped on the European Union in recent years that it is easy to forget that Europe and the EU are not the same thing. Geert Mak reminds us of this fact. He is one of the most celebrated journalists and commentators in the Netherlands. Mak – widely read, multi-lingual and endlessly curious – considers the whole of Europe to be his home. He has won awards for his books in Germany, as well as in his native Holland, and been inducted into the Legion d’Honneur in France. He is also, on the side, a bit of an anglophile. In 1999, with millennial fever rising, Mak

While Ian McEwan’s recent piece in the Guardian is not expressly termed a treatise on the value of art, it is hard to see it otherwise. What is the use of fiction, what can a novelist tell us of, ‘why the Industrial Revolution began, or how the Higgs boson confers mass on fundamental particles…?’ he asks. At the heart of this modern day ‘defense of poesy’ is McEwan’s devotion to realism: it is realism that falls last to ‘the icy waters of scepticism’ and it is realism that saves him from it. He gives an account of how his thirteen year-old self, so overcome by the description of the 1900