The ideal reader

2025 marked the centenary of Erik Satie’s death, an event honoured by commemorations around the globe, including series of concerts, workshops, exhibitions and guided tours in his birthplace of Honfle

In 1990, the sculptor Rachel Whiteread cast the interior of the sitting room of a vacant London house in plaster of Paris to create “Ghost”, a work which the critic Jonathan Jones described as “the so

John P. Murphy New Deal Art 336pp. Thames and Hudson. Paperback, £19.99. Seymour Fogel’s “Wealth of the Nation”, installed in 1942 in a federal building in Washington DC, depicts a group of workers en

“As movers and the moved both know”, John Updike noted, “books are heavy freight ... They make us think twice about changing addresses.” Books: A manifesto, or, How to build a library begins with the

Authorial intelligence versus artificial intelligence: an ongoing palaver. We would rather think as little as we can about the possibilities of both; but it seems irresponsible to ignore the intellect

Gerald Howard’s The Insider is a crowded but colourful portrait of Malcolm Cowley, poet, editor and chronicler of the so-called Lost Generation – those American exemplars of literary modernism who, li