From George Stubbs’s golden vision of the labourer’s place in society to Ford Madox Brown’s heroically monumental celebration of manual labour, artists gave individual interpretations of work, as Michael Hall reveals

There is much to admire in Andrew Graham-Dixon’s study of Vermeer—but not its tendency to overinterpret the old master’s work “Johannes Vermeer is the most laconic of the Dutch old masters,” Andrew Gr

A Queer Inheritance: Alternative Histories in the National ...

Sometimes, a single narrative comes to dominate how we remember a year. So it is with 1776. This, as every history lover knows, was the date that the American colonies declared their independence, beg

I’M sure you have all heard the expression about getting the proverbial “clean slate”. I recall from my young schooldays the response of our primary teacher when the children had been misbehaving in c

Dan Sperrin State of Ridicule A history of satire in English literature 816pp. Princeton University Press. £38 (US $45). In State of Ridicule: A history of satire in English literature, Dan Sperrin ha