There’s something a bit theme-park about Oxford. Lovers of fantasy fiction, young and old, can hurtle down Alice’s rabbit hole, as excavated by Lewis Carroll – the pseudonym of the Oxford don Charles ...

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, ...

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 ...

Angela Merkel was the first and last East German to lead a united Germany, Europe’s central power. There may be future chancellors who come from the lands that were once the German Democratic Republic ...

How has Ireland become one of the powerhouses of global rugby despite an island population of only seven million and at least three sports (football, Gaelic football and hurling) that command more ...

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 ...