Martin Gayford

Andy Warhol famously predicted that everybody would enjoy 15 minutes of fame in the modern age.

There are gruesome images of the human body as meat, animals sliced to display inner organs, and a morbid obsession with skulls.

“I walked along the road with two friends,” wrote Edvard Munch. “Suddenly the sky became blood … I heard a huge extraordinary scream pass through nature.”

A middle-aged woman carries a huge bundle of rough, scratchy-looking twigs clasped close to her naked body. Every detail -- her toenails, her hair, the red striations on her skin caused by the twigs -- is so convincing that you could almost think she was alive.

On Feb. 7, 1506, Albrecht Durer wrote home to Nuremberg from Venice. He had been warned, he mentioned, not to eat with Venetian painters, presumably to avoid poisoning since many were his enemies and copied his work.

The big new show at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, “British Design 1948-2012: Innovation in the Modern Age,” probably features quite a few exhibits that are also on view at your local charity shop.

If nothing else, Damien Hirst is good at titles.

It’s a half-forgotten fact that Piet Mondrian once lived in London.

There’s a surprising vogue in London for exhibitions designed to make Britons look bad.

Johan Zoffany (1733-1810) is alleged to have been the only member of Britain’s Royal Academy to practice cannibalism.

The disclosure that Picasso’s “Child With a Dove” is to go on sale is good news for the National Galleries of London and Edinburgh.

Though he has been dead for almost 500 years, Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) continues to surprise.