Johann Sebastian Bach is arguably the greatest of all composers, with the “St. Matthew Passion” and the “Mass in B Minor” among the most sublime masterpieces in classical music. But biographers over the past half century have “sanitised” his life, in the belief that ...

A poster of one of Vincent van Gogh’s sunflowers is one of the traditional adornments to a student bedroom. The rest of us hang our reproductions in the knowledge that even the good ones are far from faithful to the originals — for which ...