How did we get where we are, we human freaks of nature? Language, rational thought, art, science and technology set us apart from other species. Add to that list (more curse than accomplishment) an ...

When in 1960 I first came across Osip Mandelstam’s poetry, nobody in the USSR had enjoyed access to his work since the early 1930s and few even knew of his existence, let alone of his death, as he had ...

A basic duty of any reviewer is to say what the work in question is about. That is something of a challenge in this case. William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love is obviously, and winningly, ...

‘South America’, declared the North American Review in the early 19th century, ‘will be to North America what Asia and Africa are to Europe.’ ‘Not quite,’ says Greg Grandin. But also not for want of ...

Half a century ago Oliver Reed and Kate Millett each had a career-defining moment involving D H Lawrence: Reed when he played Gerald in Ken Russell’s 1969 film adaptation of Women in Love, with its ...

In the 17th century, the Uffizi offered its visitors a rather more diverse range of exhibits than it does now, among them weapons made by some distant precursor of Q Branch. The Scottish traveller ...

Like many who work in secret intelligence services, Vladimir Putin was heavily influenced by spy fiction. His imagination was coloured by novels and films, and he spoke of his amazement that ‘one ...

In 1989, when Thomas Heatherwick was eighteen years old, he picked up a Taschen book about the Catalan architect Antoni Gaudí in a student book sale. Inside it, he saw a double-page spread showing ...

In June 1941 I happened to be in, of all places, Palestine, flying with the RAF against the Vichy French and the Nazis. Hitler happened to be in Germany and the gas-chambers were being built and the ...

Over recent years, a rather unusual controversy has made waves in Germany. At its centre is Prince Georg Friedrich, head of the house of Hohenzollern, the family that supplied Prussia’s kings from ...

If asked to name the most consequential global business figure of the last half-century, few would choose Masayoshi Son. The Japanese billionaire has not invented any transformative technology, like ...

In 1843, two years before her death at the age of seventy-two, Cassandra Austen told her brother Charles that she had been ‘looking over & destroying some of my Papers’, but was keeping ‘a few letters ...