How did an ancient poet and painter who died in obscurity come to obsess everyone from Oscar Wilde to David Hockney, Robert Mapplethorpe, Derek Jarman and David Bowie? The writer of a new book explains his glorious allure
From cruise ships to UFOs, from King Kong to a giant whale, half the sex in Japan may take place in its dazzlingly imaginative love hotels. But have some become just too seedy? Our writer checks in
He is famed for being a pioneer of the moving image – but there was so much more to Muybridge than that. The great graphic novelist Guy Delisle explains why he turned his life into a rollicking read
The final book in Jim Heimann’s survey of a century of US advertising takes us to a decade where Apple sold a new way of living and mermaids hawked Evian. It’s a ‘swan song’, he says – for his series but also the industry as a whole
The latest book from artist Lee Shulman, who has created the world’s largest private collection of amateur colour transparencies, has an often startling sartorial focus