JOHN DIAMOND-NIGH

Interesting to see what journalists, confined from their usual beat, elect to write about. The nervy, streetish art critic #Holland Cotte...

All week long I’ve been bumping into a grousy, brilliantine-haired, saturnine, avant-garde, old-fashioned man. By phone, an elderly frien...

Last night, as it rained, I stood outside, under a metal canopy, just to listen. Had already listened to #Arvo Pärt, to #Brian Eno, both ...

Roosting on a hardwood pew, fidgeting with a stick of Juicy Fruit gum before my sister could catch me out, the crucifixion was of less in...

#Téju Cole says that “#spring, even in America, is #Japanese.” Is there any blossoming tree anywhere on earth that is not, thanks to arti...

What will the #reset button be, who will press it, and to what ideology will that button be wired? Will we clamber back as fast as we can...

Yesterday, quite coincidentally, I heard two pop songs about Vienna. The first was by an obscure musician who lived next door to Lynne gr...

The world has #slowed. How many friends have observed that, subtracting the perils of the #virus itself, the whirlpool skirts of #anxiety...

Many devout N Carolingians I bump into think the #president talks too much but otherwise is an honorable man. Ethical, pure, muscular, cr...

Near the top of every list of all-time best design books is a slim volume by a Japanese novelist called In Praise of Shadows. I had tried...

Nothing, says novelist Julian Barnes, dates faster than excess. He is writing about the Paris painter Gustav Moreau, a fantasist and pict...

At the end of a solo day in #Paris, I’ve turned my feet into whining adversaries, eaten too much chocolate, seen some fine galleries, som...

An old street in a #European city can feel a lot like the nave of a church. Breezy diagonal lines of wash hang high overhead like rib vau...

Global or local? Native or universal? Funny, but the topic came up several times this week, once in a chat about art (that usual café tri...

Makoto Fujimoro is a painter of startlingly beautiful abstract paintings. As far as I can tell, he’s not just an inventive painter but a w...

My 3-D class is making #boats, or rather some original water-borne invention that will float them across the pond on campus. Yoshi and Ca...

Whenever we move, I pack a small set of six or seven words with the care I’d devote to ancestral Meissen porcelain. To friends who visit,...

On a clear winter morning, like some cinematic delirium, aurora borealis ganged and flaunted ahead of us in the starry darkness. By daybr...

Grapevine Road winds skyward, twisting back on itself like a fistful of crumpled wire. At the crest, a row of broken tombstones juts from...

Always April. Sometimes by train. Snaking into Florence by the grim, industrial conduit that drew us from the outlands to the exquisitely...