JOHN DIAMOND-NIGH

Interesting to see what journalists, confined from their usual beat, elect to write about. The nervy, streetish art critic #Holland Cotter took me by surpris...

All week long I’ve been bumping into a grousy, brilliantine-haired, saturnine, avant-garde, old-fashioned man. By phone, an elderly friend recounts seeing #T...

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 perfect for these in...

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 interest than a much m...

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

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 to the way things w...

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

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

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

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 to obtain it in the...

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

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, some resplendent archit...

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 vaults, cross-streets l...

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 trinity of latte, crois...

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 wonderfully exemplar...

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 Carla, using PVC pipe ...

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, to those who attend...

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

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

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