Melanie McDonagh

You know what I want with a haircut? Silence. I want the hairdresser to keep his or her eyes on the scissors and not get distracted by conversation. I want to know that, during the crucial period when it could all go horribly wrong, the man or woman...

Is there a weirder modern painting than Richard Dadd’s The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke? There’s the hypnotic swirl of the structure — dotted with daisies — behind a barricade of stems. There’s the preposterous miniaturisation of the fairy world, for the action centres on the cracking of a hazelnut to make a carriage for the fairy Queen Mab. There is the scattering of monstrosities among the little folk — the couple with heads squashed into their necks; the strange old man under the earthen ledge surveying the scene; the even tinier folk in the earth layer above him and the pathetic chap with a white beard staring into the distance like a lunatic, which is apt enough since it was done in an asylum. The peculiar perspective, the hallucinatory detail, the swirling composition make the thing unforgettable.

Melanie McDonagh Is there a weirder modern painting than Richard Dadd's The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke?

The V&A’s ‘racist’ and ‘colonial’ row proves no amount of globalism can satisfy the anti-Eurocentric mob

It’s holiday season! Wondering what books to pack? Look no further...

The American Vice President’s memoir is not the story of a return to the Evangelicalism of his childhood but of a gradual discovery of Catholicism through Augustine, Leo XIII and the Church's social teaching

The patterns that the London Underground commissioned from Enid Marx are on display at Compton Verney – just ignore the dire curation

Enid Marx once pondered ‘whether postage stamps are fine or industrial art. In my view the question rests on the quality of a design rather than its purpose. It is generally agreed, for example, that the work of Thomas Bewick is fine art, even when...

It’s time to rediscover the treasures under our noses. Here are a few places to start

Melanie McDonagh Millions of us visit London's great museums and galleries , but what's remarkable is what we manage to overlook — entire