The author offers intriguing insights into the way this Dutch artist worked, including fresh perspectives on The Girl With the Pearl EarringIn the decades after the death of the Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer in 1675, few knew his name or work. He was so unknown that his paintings were sold with the forged signatures of more popular artists attached. All that changed in the mid-19th century, when his art was reassessed by French critics. Today Vermeer is one of the most admired painters in the world, although, says art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon, he has “proved stubbornly resistant to interpretation”.Vermeer: A Life Lost and Found, Graham-Dixon’s biography which was six years in the writing, endeavours to answer some unresolved questions, among them: what was Vermeer’s life like? Why did he paint the way he did? What was the intent behind his paintings, of which only 36 exist? Unlike the Dutch genre painters of his time, the Delft-born Vermeer painted solemn yet luminous works featuring women in domestic settings and engaged in activities such as reading, writing, playing music or pouring milk. His ability to render light, and its softening effect on rooms and people, was unparalleled. Continue reading...

15 Oct 2026 14:00 ✍️ RSS THE GUARDIAN

Raised as one of 11, the Vancouver artist (and model) is now signed by A24. She talks about her ultra-religious childhood and how – despite her album title – she still suffers from imposter syndromeThe first time Sophia Stel came to London, she slept outside in the freezing cold. The Vancouver songwriter had finished a live set last autumn, then gone out until 3am with her then crush, but when they returned to their Airbnb, they found that Stel’s manager had dead-bolted the door and fallen asleep. Stel plus crush looked for a hotel but ultimately had no choice but to kip on the doorstep. “We hadn’t spent that much time together and I got to see how she was in a stressful situation,” Stel says, smiling at the memory. “She kept her vibe up and tried to solve it – I knew I was so in love then.”A lot has changed in Stel’s life in the year since. She opened her business bank account as an artist, and that crush is now her girlfriend. “It’s a lot of change, but maybe because of my Sagittarius moon, I’m fine with it to an extent,” she says, only half-joking, when we meet at her publicist’s office in south London, the 27-year-old Stel in her uniform of vintage hoodie and Adidas trackies. Continue reading...

13 Oct 2026 10:22 ✍️ RSS THE GUARDIAN

(XL)This is a beguiling, endlessly inventive and frequently astonishing fifth LP from a group at increasing ease with being the best band of their generationFifteen centuries ago, the Byzantine archbishop Theophilus of Adana did first-hand business with the devil for his own superficial betterment. Today, we just blindly tick a little box marked “accept terms and conditions” or let high-street snake oil merchants inject poison into our faces. The Faustian pact has become as depressingly banal as it is endemic and destructive – and unlike Theophilus, we can’t rely on the Virgin Mary to save us now. In the midst of headlines about AI destroying humanity, the idea of listening to music submerged in precisely this shade of doom might sound like, well, hell. If anyone can thread that poisoned needle, it’s Fontaines DC.When the Dublin band introduced their last album, 2024’s Romance, it came with a surprise new look. Their uncoordinated jeans and shirts had been replaced by neon hair, shiny trousers and bug-eyed sunglasses that split the difference between Korn and the Prodigy. As they faced up to having traded their anonymity to become arena fillers, it wasn’t hard to read this look as a sort of protective cosplay, a cybergoth Sasha Fierce for five fairly low-key Irish lads trying to make peace with leaving their roots behind. Newly melodic and lavishly produced, Romance made no bones about the band’s ambitions and became their first platinum-certified album. Continue reading...

12 Oct 2026 06:00 ✍️ RSS THE GUARDIAN

The prize-winning author returns to Australia’s colonial archives to reflect on our thirst for answers. But like her source material, the results are slipperyGet our weekend culture and lifestyle emailIn much of her work – The Secret River, The Lieutenant and later A Room Made of Leaves and Restless Dolly Maunder – Kate Grenville has turned to historical archives as source material. But when she chanced upon a furious letter about a schoolteacher in northern New South Wales, she wasn’t sure there would be enough there. But Joseph Connor, a rural educator in the 1880s, had been accused of viciously beating and maltreating children in the town where her grandmother grew up – and the story wouldn’t let her go. “Powerful emotion of any kind is irresistible to a novelist,” she explained in a recent interview.So she kept reading. In 1884, just a few years after public schooling was made law, Connor was appointed the sole teacher at the school in Currabubula, a tiny town on Gomeroi country (also spelled Kamilaroi or Gamilaraay). Through letters, reports and transcripts from the archives, Grenville pieces together a hazy picture of the decade that follows: as he fathered more and more children of his own, there were anonymous complaints, petty feuds, and arguments with parents over fees. Then there were accusations that Connor had seriously beaten and “marked” several children; one lost a finger. There were inquiries and court hearings, but nothing was really proved. After 11 pregnancies, Connor’s exhausted wife died; a few years later, so did he. Continue reading...

15 Oct 2026 21:00 ✍️ RSS THE GUARDIAN

Following the death of his wife, a critic-teacher takes a job with an art-washing multinational, in a cinematic novel that is full of ideasAt the end of a night in a London pub, after last orders have been called, three friends are joking about what role they’d serve on a remote desert island, with no one but their fellow plane crash survivors for company. When one of them, an art critic turned reluctant schoolteacher, says that he would become an artist, he is, naturally, mocked. His friend Sybil, who actually is a painter, casts herself more sensibly as a demigod-queen of the island and employs her newly creative companion to “certify her glory”. “That’s what artists are for,” she says, “I pay you in fermented coconut water and you tell yourself you’re free and drink yourself to death.”This is about as clear a statement as one could wish for regarding the position of contemporary art as it relates to power: the boot of the latter is placed firmly on the former’s throat. This relationship is the central theme of The Floating World, Ben Eastham’s debut novel, which is narrated by the somewhat hapless and unnamed critic-teacher. And what has led to this existential pub conversation is an unexpected opportunity: following the death of the narrator’s wife in an unnamed war zone, he has been offered a job with the Morel Foundation, an art-washing spin-off of an arms-manufacturing multinational which extracts profit from all corners of a wartorn world while its cultural wing props up the ego of its eponymous overlord CEO. Continue reading...

15 Oct 2026 06:00 ✍️ RSS THE GUARDIAN

Looking for a new reading recommendation? Here are some brilliant new paperbacks, from a time-travelling fantasy novel to an eclectic essay collection. Discuss what you’re reading in paperback in the comments*** Continue reading...

14 Oct 2026 14:32 ✍️ RSS THE GUARDIAN

The star takes us back to 70s New York to recount his breakthrough, and it’s a great yarn – but it’s laced with angerThe Philadelphia Museum of Art contains a 14th-century Buddhist temple, a one-acre sculpture garden and works by Picasso, Renoir and Van Gogh. Its most famous attraction, however, is a flight of stone steps that draws several million tourists every year. These are the so-called “Rocky Steps”, immortalised by Sylvester Stallone in his 1976 movie about an underdog boxer who needs to build up his strength. The climb is a lung-busting challenge, but if unremarkable Rocky can sprint all the way to the top, he gives hope and encouragement to everyone down below.It’s not just the fans who relate to Rocky Balboa. So too does Stallone, whose entertaining rags-to-riches memoir paints the creator and his creation as all but indivisible, each an extension of the other. Stallone was flat broke and beaten down when he wrote his film about “the forgotten man”, the blue-collar schlub with a good heart and firm chin. Everyone knows that Rocky is being set up as a fall guy. He can’t possibly defeat Apollo Creed, the dazzling, charismatic, undefeated heavyweight champion of the world. Except that Rocky doesn’t care, he only wants to be seen, and in scripting an unlikely redemptive arc for his hero, Stallone wound up transforming his own fortunes as well. Continue reading...

14 Oct 2026 06:00 ✍️ RSS THE GUARDIAN