Most Recent. In Arts & Letters – Spirituality.

Arts & Letters – Spirituality

Tibor Fischer-Intellectual Red Bull

László Földényi’s essays are a collection that will leave you feeling sharp and more cultured, says Tibor Fischer hat remains to fill the place of God, when God has been exiled and history and progress have also proved undeserving of trust?” asks László Földényi in the preface to his collection of essays, the wonderfully titled Dostoyevsky Reads Hegel In Siberia And Bursts Into Tears. Földényi is a professor at the University of...

Russell Smith – How Algorithms Are Changing What We Read Online

LAST NOVEMBER, I stopped writing a regular column on art and culture for the Globe and Mail, my job for almost twenty years. Nobody noticed. I did not receive a single reader’s letter. I had a polite message from my section editor. He was sorry things didn’t work out and hoped we could stay in touch. The note contained no sense of symbolic occasion. I knew what I did was no...

Reagan Upshaw-Vincent Van Gogh’s image is cemented in our cultural memory. His letters complicate the view.

From “The Agony and the Ecstasy,” with Charlton Heston as Michelangelo, to “Pollock,” starring Ed Harris, Hollywood films on the lives of tortured artists have been catnip to the general public, and no artist has gained a larger share of attention than Vincent van Gogh. Kirk Douglas, in 1956’s “Lust for Life,” cemented the prevailing image of the Dutch artist: a tortured genius, helpless in the grip of a vision...

Alexander Larman – Is artistic nepotism an evil – or a necessity?

Nepotism in the arts is very much alive and here to stay The other day, I discovered that a talented young writer was publishing her first novel. She seemed to have a good, if not unusual back story; she had been working as a bookseller in the estimable Mr B’s Emporium in Bath and had published her debut collection of short stories earlier this year. And then I caught sight...