Nigel Bruce

From Russia with Love

Mikhail Vrubel's 'Demon Seated in a Garden'

Did you start here? Vrubel's paintings are dark, possessed, hallucinations - this was from 1890 and it is his most famous painting. We live in a fallen world, a world for pessimists. Art fans are drawn to the innovative use of color and the iridescent sheen, as a

Homer's Women

Miyazaki’s Nausicaa

Filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki has written: “I have been fascinated by her ever since I first read about her in Bernard Evslin’s Japanese translation of a small dictionary of Greek mythology. Later, when I actually read the Odyssey, I was disappointed not to find the same splendor in her there

Kama Sutra

Moksha

Following the conflagration of World War I, Western philosophers struggled to come up with a prescription for spiritual resurrection in the West. Virility was very much on their minds and it's hard to avoid the sexual metaphors in their books. The most pessimistic, Oswald Spengler's Decline

Angel Incarnate

'Mona Lisa'

Trompe l'œil means a trick of the eye - art that deceives the eye - and it became popular from the 15th century. Leonardo is not really associated with it in any formal sense, aside from The Last Supper, but how else can we debate the Mona Lisa

Precious Bodily Fluids

Montaigne

Montaigne on the body, sex, marriage and everything else... Reading Montaigne is not for everyone, but one of its pleasures is stumbling across the many witty insights about the "rebellious and tyrannical" penis, women's dildos, huge codpieces, impotence and the like. As many have said, he

Kama Sutra

Monte Verità

It all seemed to make sense... Old Europe’s empires were imploding and Christianity had lost its grip, industrialization soiled the landscape and people fled for the hills or for America. From around 1902 and for decades to come, Ascona would lure Carl Jung, Isadora Duncan, D.H. Lawrence, Franz

Voices and Saints

Mont-Saint-Michel

The reality is something else these days: this amazing place is overrun by thousands of tourists at all times, like it's Disneyland. This postcard image of a hundred years ago is somehow more evocative of the medieval abbey. There is really no way that Mont-Saint-Michel could ever look

The Sorcerer's Apprentice

Mormonism

Mormonism - the religion of the Latter Day Saints - truly does have a claim to being the Great American Religion. Its success in the 1830s and 1840s means, after all, that imported Christianity was deemed insufficient. For Melville it was the Dutch Calvinism of his mother and the Unitarianism

The Sorcerer's Apprentice

Mormons, Muslims and Harems

Americans made connections early on between polygamists in the U.S. and the Ottoman rulers of Istanbul and their harems. The Mormons weren't the first polygamists, but after the revelations of the 1840's, they became the most prominent ones. What is rarely acknowledged, however, is that

Splendour in the Grass

Mount Peel Station

The Mt. Peel Station homestead was built between 1865 and 1867, becoming the first of the Canterbury high country sheep stations. It remains privately owned. Nearby is the Church of the Holy Innocents (below), which was completed in 1869. It can be visited but it was badly damaged by the

Voices and Saints

Mucha's 'Maude Adams as Joan of Arc'

Czech painter Alphonse Mucha designed this poster when he was living in Chicago in 1909. It depicts American actress Maude Adams playing Joan in a stage version of Schiller's Die Jungfrau von Orleans. The idea is that Joan is terrified of the vision behind her shoulder, encouraging Joan

Women in Trousers

Mulan

China has its own androgynous figure with the legend of Hua Mulan from the 4th-6th centuries CE. She is famous for disguising herself as a man and for fighting in many bloody campaigns before returning home and being outed as a woman at her home near Luoyang in Henan. Maxine

Life as Opera

The Music of Decline

Hermann Hesse is covered more fully here but his ideas about the futility of art and literature after the catastrophe of World War I can be found in Klingsor’s Last Summer (1919) and again later in The Glass Bead Game (Das Glasperlenspiel, 1943). Here he could have been talking

Poison Pen Letters

My Favorite Agatha Christie Mysteries

When I first read Agatha Christie's mysteries, I most enjoyed The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Murder on the Orient Express and Ten Little Niggers (And Then There Were None), which are without doubt her masterpieces, but I think you can only read them once. I was never a

Alice's Mirrors

Mystical Ecstasy

Is mystical ecstasy really displaced sexual ecstasy like in the image above? I find it difficult to interpret medieval mystical writing any other way, especially by women mystics like Teresa of Ávila (Teresa de Jesús) and Margery Kempe, and what am I to make of Catherine of Siena's

The Age of Consent

Vladimir Nabokov and butterflies

This portrait above of Nabokov is by German painter Carl Spitzweg (1840). Below is another more standard portrait photo. For Nabokov as Sirin, here

Precious Bodily Fluids

Naples

If Othello were set in Naples... It was in Napoli that Carlo Gesualdo, Prince of Venosa (and celebrated musician) murdered his beautiful wife, Donna Maria d’Avalos, and her lover, in 1590. No doubt Gesualdo relied on some assassins to do the bloody work. It is all the more interesting

Splendour in the Grass

Napoleon as Ozymandias

In 1815, when Napoleon escaped from the island of Elba, Byron wrote in a letter how much he admired Napoleon, the Romantic hero he wanted to be. It is impossible not to be dazzled and overwhelmed by his character and career. Nothing ever so disappointed me as his abdication, and

Life as Opera

Natalie Barney

Natalie Barney once wrote: “My queerness is not a vice, is not deliberate, and harms no one.” In 1900, she published Quelques Portraits-Sonnets de Femmes, a collection of love poems to women, which was suitably scandalous, if not great poetry. Soon after, her father died and left her a large

The Sorcerer's Apprentice

Nauvoo

In 1840, Nauvoo, Illinois, was on its way to becoming the 10th largest city in the U.S. as converts flooded in from Old and New England. Some estimates are that there were 20,000 people there by 1844, making Nauvoo the largest city in Illinois. After the disastrous events

Life as Opera

Neuschwanstein Castle and Wagner

Ludwig II's grandest creation was Neuschwanstein Castle (Schloss Neuschwanstein), literally "New Swan on the Rock palace." The colorized postcard below is from around 1900; Ludwig had died in 1886. Within its walls are many paintings depicting scenes from Wagner's operas. The postcards below, from

The House of Incest

Anaïs Nin and 'Under a Glass Bell'

Under a Glass Bell was originally was published in 1944 and in the following years it gained the attention of literary critics and the public. It was her breakthrough work. Later editions were all different, as some stories were dropped and others added but, in total, the book is a

The Judgment of Paris

Places associated with Ninon de Lenclos

The influential courtesan and intellectual Ninon de Lenclos held her salon from 1667 onwards in the Hôtel de Sagonne at 36, rue des Tournelles, in the Marais district, where she lived for 48 years. It is also where she died, in 1705. The building is still there although now it

Women in Trousers

How Nintendo Stole Mickey Mouse

It is well recognized that founding father of Japanese manga, Osamu Tezuka, was influenced by the early Walt Disney films he saw. It is also well recognized that Walt Disney Studios returned the favor when Tezuka’s Kimba the White Lion (1950-54) was reshaped into The Lion King (1994), even

How to Look at a Naked Lady

Norman Rockwell and voyeurism

Norman Rockwell was America's greatest painter. Below are four of his iconic images, which I chose because they appear to spy on private moments. They are Rorschach tests that invite different interpretations - optimistic, pessimistic, cynical and agnostic. Under Fair Use I have included thumbnails but to really