Arts & Culture

Blame it on the good times

Michael Jackson’s genius lay in transmuting black pop music into a global form. His tragedy was that he forgot what made him great.

Perspectives

Peter Blake on Lewis Carroll’s Alice

Mama said knock you out

In 1979, Margaret Thatcher became prime minister – and a rap record was a hit for the first time. Mark Fisher reflects on how for three decades hip-hop has provided the perfect soundtrack to the brutality of the neoliberal world-view

In touch with the elements

Primal patterns of a seemingly chaotic world come to the surface in sculpture

Public Enemies (15)

Dazzling visuals can’t disguise a lack of character in this 1930s crime flick

Revelations: How to Find God

Jon Ronson rather breezed through his sojourn among the spiritually eager

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He’s just not that into you, Miss Eyre

How would the great romances of literature have fared in the self-help era?

Nothing is as it seems

The new Magritte Museum gives William Cook a fresh perspective on Brussels, the capital of surrealism

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Pleasures of the flesh

A new television series encourages the nation to take up life classes. Our art critic Tim Adams does just that, and discovers that drawing the human body is a form of ritual communion in which the sitter is as active as the artist