Picture this: a green silk sofa and a “Chinese” coffee table lit by Tiffany lamps; a copy of Bunte, a gossip magazine, faded and splayed open to reveal a picture of a blurry, besoffen Prince Ernst ...

Graphic posters denouncing abortion, new legislation decriminalizing battery in the home, laws banning “homosexual propaganda”, violent attacks on gay rights activists – all this is part of the ...

Veroniki Dalakoura (b.1952) first came to the notice of her translator, John Taylor, after their mutual friend Elias Petropoulos alerted him to her work. It is easy to see how Petropoulos, bard of the ...

The Weimar Republic, founded after the revolution that overthrew the Kaiser in 1918 and destroyed fifteen years later by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, still seems to many to offer the paradigm for ...

When asked which historical female figure he would most like to dine with, Umberto Eco named the renowned medieval beauty Uta von Naumburg “above all others”. The same impulse appears to have been ...

In Storm’s Edge, Peter Marshall’s new portrait of Orkney, the islands where he was born and raised, the historian concentrates not on Neolithic monuments, Iron Age brochs, Norse-era castles or the ...

The Egyptian poet Joyce Mansour was a leading member of the surrealist group around André Breton. An exile living in Paris, she often made a myth of her life. “I was born in 1928”, she once declared, ...

In Brussels, the Baudouin Tower sits on a corner in the business district. The building is heavy, boxy, boring, of a piece with the many piles of glass and steel in the neighbourhood. Yet inside this ...

Welcome to Darkenbloom, a town in Austria’s easternmost and least attractive province, on the border with Hungary. A town whose castle burnt down in 1946, whose count fled and whose tourist offerings ...

In the town, no one has a shadow. That is because the people have their shadows stripped at birth, or else leave them at the impenetrable twenty-six-foot-high wall that surrounds the town, guarded by ...

Bernard Cerquiglini is a former director of the Institut national de la langue française, and the first part of his catchy title quotes the former French prime minister Georges Clemenceau, who was ...

The life of Henri Bergson provides rich material for an intellectual biography. Philosopher of the lived experience of time and of the élan vital in biological and psychological life, he became at the ...