Encounters · No. 7 The Vandal with a Vision Asger Jorn bought other people’s paintings at flea markets and painted over them. He helped invent two of the twentieth century’s most radical movements and then walked away from both. He believed that art was not a product but a way of being alive. He wasContinue reading “Asger Jorn”
Author Archives: My World of Interiors
Mick Rooney, 1944–2026: The Painter of the Human Theatre
The British painter and Royal Academician, whose mysterious, richly coloured pictures transformed ordinary human life into scenes of dream, myth and private theatre, has died. Mick Rooney, the British painter whose strange, densely imagined figurative pictures occupied a distinctive place in British art for more than half a century, has died. Born in 1944, RooneyContinue reading “Mick Rooney, 1944–2026: The Painter of the Human Theatre”
Peter Max, 1937–2026: The Artist Who Coloured the Counterculture
The German-born American artist, whose ecstatic suns, rainbows, cosmic figures and Day-Glo colours became part of the visual language of the 1960s, has died aged 88. Peter Max, the artist whose brilliant colours, cosmic landscapes and buoyant psychedelic imagery became almost inseparable from the visual culture of the American 1960s, died on 14 September 2026Continue reading “Peter Max, 1937–2026: The Artist Who Coloured the Counterculture”
Annie Dillard, 1945–2026: The Fierce Attention of a Life
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, whose ecstatic, exacting prose transformed the observation of nature into an inquiry into consciousness, faith and existence, has died aged 81. Annie Dillard, one of the most singular voices in postwar American literature, died on 15 September 2026 at her home in South Wellfleet, Massachusetts. SheContinue reading “Annie Dillard, 1945–2026: The Fierce Attention of a Life”
In Memoriam – Bob Mackie
The Sultan of Sequins Bob Mackie, who died on 14 September 2026 at the age of eighty-seven, dressed the century’s most luminous performers in the most theatrical clothes ever made for a body. He understood, better than almost anyone in the history of costume, that a great dress was not decoration but transformation — thatContinue reading “In Memoriam – Bob Mackie”
The Place That Refuses to Try
The Passenger is a weekly dispatch on travel — places, hotels, restaurants, the strange logistics of being elsewhere. It is written by Bergotte. Comporta, Portugal, and the particular luxury of somewhere that has decided not to become anything other than itself There is a type of place that becomes fashionable precisely because it has notContinue reading “The Place That Refuses to Try”
The Reel Argument: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
By Bergotte Rainer Werner Fassbinder made forty-four films in sixteen years, and then he died at thirty-seven of a drug overdose in a Munich flat in 1982, and the output is so staggering and the life so short that the mathematics alone feel like an argument — an argument that something was burning in thisContinue reading “The Reel Argument: Rainer Werner Fassbinder”
The New Dark Ages
What We Lose When We Stop Reading Book: The New Dark Ages: The End of Reading and the Dawn of a Post-Literate SocietyAuthor: James MarriottPublisher: The Bodley HeadPublication: 3 September 2026Pages: 208ISBN: 9781847929518Genre: Cultural criticism / Social commentary / Media studies There is something almost quaint about worrying about the death of reading. We haveContinue reading “The New Dark Ages”
The Life of Somebody Else
Rachel Cusk, Natalie Portman and the Ethical Problem of Autofiction Rachel Cusk’s Life of M has produced one of the strangest literary controversies of the year. Its famous actress is fictional, yet recognisably assembled from details belonging to Natalie Portman. The resulting argument is larger than celebrity gossip: it asks who owns a life, whatContinue reading “The Life of Somebody Else”
The Human Condition According to Henry James
By Bergotte Henry James believed that consciousness was the most important thing in the world. Not action, not achievement, not the accumulation of experience in the traveller’s sense — the places visited, the people met, the events survived — but the quality of attention brought to experience, the precision and depth with which a mindContinue reading “The Human Condition According to Henry James”
My World of Interiors 