In 1848, Louis Pasteur looked at tiny grains of a salt under a magnifying glass and was able to distinguish two crystal forms. They looked almost identical – but not quite. The two crystals had a symmetry of reflection: they were ‘in relation to each other what an image is, in a mirror, in relation to the real thing’.
The Belgian photographer’s 2012 image exemplifies his gift for connecting with animals on camera
Tom Adams
Sundsy 19 January 2025
Recent research into animal behaviour indicates that, contrary to the belief that horses only respond to stimuli in the moment, they have the ability to think ahead and plan their actions. The horse in this picture by Michel Vanden Eeckhoudt seems to have no urgent need for such strategic thinking. The mane of flaxen tresses, the loose ringlets of the tail, the languorous attitude, meadow flowers as far as the eye can see – Vanden Eeckhoudt’s horse seems to exist in a kind of pony club elysium, idly dreaming an afternoon
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The Dutch photographer’s self-portrait in a bathroom mirror reflects her fascination with the strangeness and eroticism of the body
Tim Adams
Sunday 22 October 2023
New collection of author’s diary entries provides tragic insight
Frankenstein’s monster, as horror fans know, did not really spark into life with a bolt of lightning, but was born inside the mind of Mary Shelleyduring a dreary holiday on a mountainside above Geneva. The inspiration came as volcanic ash clouds unexpectedly blocked out the sun that summer of 1816 and she and her friends, including the infamous, “bad boy” poets Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, competed to tell scary stories.
Wife of actor Mark Rylance worked in various roles at Shakespeare’s Globe and had been diagnosed with cancer
Nadeem Badshah
Saturday 18 January 2025
The director and composer Claire van Kampen, the wife of the actor Mark Rylance, has died at the age of 71 after being diagnosed with cancer.
Amir Hossein Maghsoudloo’s five-year jail term increased after prosecutor’s objection, according to reports
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| Los Angeles |
On Monday, 6 January, the National Weather Service warned Los Angeles residents of high Santa Ana winds. The Santa Anas stir in the deserts of Southern California, rush up over the mountain ranges that separate the high, dry inland regions from the coast, and then surge, hot and blustering, down towards the ocean. They often come in autumn but can strike at any time, drying out the air and cloaking the city in a shroud of brown dust.
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| David Lynch |
The late director sided with the outsider and saw things in America no one else could see. His startling oeuvre changed film and television for ever
David Lynch, the director of Twin Peaks, Eraserhead and Blue Velvet, who has died at the age of 78, leaves behind the cinematic descriptor “Lynchian”, described in the Oxford English Dictionary as “juxtaposing surreal or sinister elements with the mundane” and “using compelling visual images to emphasise a dreamlike quality of mystery or menace”.
No one reading James Davidson’s enormous and impassioned book, which barely acknowledges the existence, much less the vast numerical superiority, of Greek heterosexual society, would get the impression that Greek homoeroticism was anything less than the central principle determining the varied cultural patterns of all those obstinately independent and idiosyncratic city-states. To take one random example: the eros that inspired and bound together, in life and death, the three hundred lovers of Thebes’ elite fighting regiment, the Sacred Band, was indeed a powerful and socially significant force; but there is something fundamentally unreal (and in the end comic) about treating it as the only kind of eros that counted.
Vol. 47 No. 1 · 23 January 2025
Tell me your mystic and I will tell you who you are. The Little Flower, she of the astonishing self-love? Hildegard of Bingen, glowing like rock crystal, or Simone Weil, picking herself like a scab? Teresa of Avila, a chilly forehead and a warm thigh, or St Simeon, being written by the tip of his stylus? You may prefer Marguerite Porete, burning alive with her book, or the rich black intersection of St John of the Cross or the pyroclastic whisper of Anonymous, Unknown Author. Or something a little closer to home – Jeannie, for instance, the family friend whom my father (a Catholic priest in full cassock) calls simply a Eucharistic mystic, so guilelessly, and with such evident trust, that he does not even realise it rhymes.
