By Bergotte Agnès Varda spent sixty years making films about the people and things that the world had decided did not matter, and she did it with a curiosity so genuine and a formal intelligence so complete that the combination amounts to something close to a philosophy of cinema — a sustained argument, made inContinue reading “The Reel Argument: Agnès Varda”
Category Archives: Biography
Monstrous Bitch
Who Gets to Be a Monster? Book: Monstrous Bitch: A History of Terrifying WomenAuthor: Eleanor JohnsonPublisher: Princeton University PressPublication: 6 October 2026Pages: 344ISBN: 9780691291666Genre: Cultural history / Feminist criticism / Mythology There are monsters, and then there are women who have been made monstrous. The distinction lies at the heart of Eleanor Johnson’s wonderfully provocativeContinue reading “Monstrous Bitch”
How Proust Can Change Your Life
How Proust Can Change Your Life In 2000, the BBC made the rather unlikely decision to turn Alain de Botton’s book How Proust Can Change Your Life into a television film, with Ralph Fiennes playing Marcel Proust. The result is neither straightforward biography nor literary adaptation, but something more curious: an attempt to ask whatContinue reading “How Proust Can Change Your Life”
The Human Condition According to Mark Twain
By Bergotte Mark Twain understood that civilisation is a confidence trick. Not a failed experiment or a work in progress or a fragile achievement requiring defence, but a sustained, organised, multigenerational deception in which human beings persuade themselves and each other that the cruelties they practise are either necessary, natural, or invisible. His comedy —Continue reading “The Human Condition According to Mark Twain”
Jonathan Anderson: The Intelligent Disruptor
How a boy from Northern Ireland transformed Loewe, dismantled the boundaries between fashion and culture, and arrived at Dior with more creative power than any designer since Christian Dior himself By Bergotte Fashion periodically decides that one designer matters more than everybody else. The reasons are never entirely aesthetic. A designer becomes important because heContinue reading “Jonathan Anderson: The Intelligent Disruptor”
What’s So Special About Miriam Makeba
By Bergotte Miriam Makeba was exiled from her country for thirty-one years. She was stripped of her passport, banned from attending her mother’s funeral, and prevented from returning home to South Africa by a government that understood, correctly, that her voice was more dangerous to apartheid than most weapons available to the opposition. She respondedContinue reading “What’s So Special About Miriam Makeba”
Why Gen Z Looks So Badly Dressed to Gen X
Taste, Technology and What Happened to the Individual Eye I think About This A Lot… by Birgitte Hahn-Etc There comes a point in middle age when one catches oneself looking at a group of twenty-somethings and thinking something one had promised never to think: Why are they all dressed like that? This is treacherous territory.Continue reading “Why Gen Z Looks So Badly Dressed to Gen X”
Asger Jorn
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”
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”
