De Chirico’s cryptic works ran deep, making serious claims about contemporary life and the artist’s conviction that an over-regulated modern society pulls us down. ‘Man has made prisons for himself in every city,’ admirer Jeffrey Smart once told me, ‘for the ordinary person escape is impossible’. A concealed and lurking menace threatens us all

It came as a merciful release when, not long after a triumphant book tour of the US, the woman who began life as Deborah Mitford lost her sight and, very quickly, her mind. Born 100 years ago today, hers was a life worth recounting

It is now 45 years since the Squire of Chantry completed his 12-novel series, 'A Dance to the Music of Time'. Today, exactly 20 years since his death, let me recommend his opus in these days of plague and fear as a distraction and escape from a century that has not so far been a happy one

The world's collective intelligence shrank by measurable degree in late February, when physicist and polymath Freeman Dyson passed away at the age of 96. Sharp to the end, his brilliant career brought a penetrating logic to subjects that ranged from the most efficient way to kill Germans from the air to blitzing the charlatans of the climate change hoax

Fearing, encountering and experiencing madness of a family beset by various manifestations of derangement, the artist was able to tap and use these immersive experiences to inspire and guide his work. This was the behaviour of genius, not a lunatic

In his own near decade of dying, the late and great Clive James could not resist Marcel. Of course, years before, he had taught himself French by reading the Prix Goncourt winner of 1919 in the original. It took him fifteen years to absorb 'the eternally unique' -- an investment of effort and time that left him, like so many others, in a state akin to awe