Christopher Bray

Rock versus pop, and orchestral numbers versus guitar solos

The relationship between Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh was one of all-consuming passion

Magritte’s work is no more socially potent than dog-mess on a doorstep

How the facts of Hannah Arendt’s life read like fiction

The Magic Box is Rob Young’s impassioned, occasionally impenetrable, psycho-history of the TV of his youth

Age hasn’t withered Dylan. He was always running towards it, arms open wide.

Christopher Bray thinks Roth’s “novelist’s autobiography” is one of his most fizzing examinations of the stories that construct our various selves

Do we really need another biography about Francis Bacon? The answer is emphatically yes, says Christopher Bray

Highsmith was a great writer, with a moral vision bracing enough to clarify the terrors of the twentieth century

You will search in vain for a new life of any rocker who made his name after the advent of punk