At the peak of his powers, TS Eliot battled misery and melancholia. This second volume of his letters offers a fascinating guide to these harrowing years

Leni Riefenstahl's apologists say she was a pure aesthete who cared nothing for politics. But it was her indifference to how her talents were used that made her so repugnant

As a teenage existentialist in the 1970s, I feasted on Sartre. He had already become unfashionable in Paris, but now, on the centenary of his birth, France is coming to appreciate him again

Not since the Renaissance has a genius practised two artistic forms with equal brilliance, except Strindberg, whose paintings are as original as the plays

From pictures in a cave to aphorisms on a toilet wall, graffiti needs to be reconsidered as the purest art form

Celebrating the film-maker Humphrey Jennings and his wartime explorations of the British character. He was the Poet Laureate of 1940s cinema