George Pendle

‘Its name tells you everything you really need to know: it’s big, it’s complex and it smashes things together.’

Author George Pendle on his biography of Jack Parsons, the scientist, mysticist and follower of Aleister Crowley, now dramatized on CBS

Josef Albers's secret symbol for the Manuscript society at Yale University

George Pendle looks at the artist's ambitious new body of work tackling the Vietnam War

1913, a year of cultural, artistic and technological revolution that transformed the world

The UK's forgotten acoustic defence system

Michael Werner

Great buildings that were never built

One man's crusade against 'woo-woo'

An updated style bible heralds the return of the preppy

Edgar Allan Poe, the disappearance of the 'Poe Toaster' and the best way to find a grave

Domestic and social dynamics within the parentless homestead in the films of John Hughes

Governors Island, New York, USA

Gladstone Gallery, New York, USA

The intertwining of business, finance, art and numerology

A new exhibition about New York’s underground earth works reveals a quasi-mythological mirror image of the city

A biography of George Plimpton and Frederick Seidel’s collected poems celebrate two suave writers

The art market, insider trading and judging greatness

apexart, New York, USA

When so much art is trumpeted as being ‘political’ why do so few artists enter politics?