Category: Blog
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Pieter Bruegel the Elder
Everyone, All at Once Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted crowds, seasons, proverbs, and catastrophes. He was the first painter to look at ordinary people and decide that their lives were the whole subject. Five centuries later, no one has done it better. In the lower right corner of a painting completed around 1558, a pair…
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Istanbul: The City That Contains Everything
Istanbul in the autumn and the case for one of the world’s great cities at its most completely itself There is a moment, arriving in Istanbul for the first time, when the scale of the city’s ambition becomes briefly visible all at once. It happens most reliably from the Bosphorus — from a ferry crossing…
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Sacré-Cœur: Faith, Politics and a Night Above Paris
Sacré-Cœur occupies an unusual place in the imagination of Paris. Its white domes are immediately recognisable, yet the familiarity of the silhouette can obscure the complexity of the building beneath it. Above Montmartre’s streets, the basilica brings together religious devotion, nineteenth-century political conflict and an architecture designed to make belief visible across a city. Its…
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The Reel Argument: Yasujirō Ozu
Yasujirō Ozu made films about the same thing for forty years — the Japanese family, its dissolution, the grief of parents watching children leave, the quiet devastation of time — and he made them with a formal consistency so extreme that critics spent decades arguing about whether it was a limitation or an achievement, before…
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THE LAND AND ITS PEOPLE
There is a particular kind of intelligence required to notice what everybody else has agreed not to notice. David Sedaris has built a career from it. For more than three decades, he has observed families, airports, shop assistants, lovers, language lessons, neighbours, strangers and himself with the peculiar concentration of an anthropologist who has somehow…
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Anne Carson: The Intelligence of Desire
The 2026 Nobel laureate has brought classical scholarship, poetry and the essay into a sustained inquiry into desire, grief and the limits of knowledge. Her achievement changes how we understand the relationship between intellectual life and emotional experience. The award of the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature to Anne Carson, announced on 8 October, recognises…
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The Human Condition According to Walt Whitman
By Bergotte Walt Whitman’s answer to the human condition is the most audacious in all of literature: yes. Not the qualified yes of the philosopher who has weighed the evidence, not the fragile yes of the survivor who has come through suffering and found something on the other side, but the absolute, prior, unconditional yes…
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Room to Move: Issey Miyake’s Spring/Summer 2027 Collection
With Figure of Ma, Satoshi Kondo gives the space between body and cloth an eloquent, exuberant form. A fashion collection becomes especially compelling when its ideas can be understood through the clothes themselves. Satoshi Kondo’s Spring/Summer 2027 collection for Issey Miyake, presented at the Dojo de Paris on 2 October 2026, has precisely that quality.…
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Diébédo Francis Kéré: Building With the Village
Diébédo Francis Kéré grew up in a village in Burkina Faso with no electricity and no school. He went to Berlin on a scholarship, became an architect, and came back to build one. What he discovered in that act — about materials, about community, about what architecture is actually for — has been reshaping the…
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What’s So Special About Joy Division
By Bergotte Joy Division made two studio albums and a handful of singles between 1978 and 1980, and their singer Ian Curtis hanged himself in his kitchen in Macclesfield on the eve of the band’s first American tour, at the age of twenty-three. It would be easy — it has been easy, for forty years…
