Speaking of her late husband, Valerie Eliot once remarked “He felt he had paid too much to be a poet, that he had suffered ...

Book titles that begin “The Treasury of …” suggest a box that you open to find jewels inside. The Treasury of Folklore: ...

Standing in the full / glare of the war, I’m a surface / reflecting its awesome light”, Oksana Maksymchuk declares in Still ...

An ambitious novel of ideas, Aurélien Bellanger’s Les derniers jours du Parti socialiste (The Last Days of the Socialist ...

The publication in 1888 of the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío’s collection Azul changed the way the Spanish language was written ...

Editors and writers join Lucy Dallas and Alex Clark to talk through the week's issue. Subscribe for free via iTunes, Spotify and other podcast platforms ...

It is a courageous soul who would take on the challenge of writing a Life (even a partial Life) of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. The man lived a long time for his era, from 1646 to 1716. That is seventy ...

The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) pursued two main themes in his work, one now familiar, even commonplace in modernity, the other still under-appreciated, often ignored. The ...

Henry VIII had six wives and at least as many Thomases: Wolsey, More, Cranmer, Cromwell, Howard (Third Duke of Norfolk), Wriothesley (pronounced “Risley”, eventually First Earl of Southampton).

From the late 1980s onwards, novelists, artists, critics and art historians have foreseen the death of postmodernism. Linda Hutcheon, in the second edition of The Politics of Postmodernism (2002), ...

The Romans had many ways of dealing with the statues of those they no longer wanted to honour. Some they (or their enemies) destroyed: the head of the emperor Claudius found in the river near ...

The day before the shutdown I went into our daughters’ school to teach philosophy. A number of teachers were absent, either because they had underlying health conditions or because they lived with ...