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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 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, ...

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 ...

Towards the end of Tessa Hadley’s engaging new novella, The Party, Moira, a young fashion student, throws herself into a high-stakes sexual competition for a handsome but predatory American serviceman ...

“Manchester is the south of the north”, writes Jeanette Winterson: spot-on. I’ve never met anyone who has a clear mental map of the place. On the ground it seems to have a grid pattern, but the roads ...

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 ...

“How should one read a book?” Virginia Woolf asked this question, in different forms, throughout her life. In an essay of 1926 with that title, she described the pure pleasure that readers know: the ...

Joan Smith’s history of Roman imperial women in the first, Julio-Claudian dynasty is an uncompromising study of violent misogyny. Of the twenty-three individuals she discusses, sixteen were killed on ...