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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

“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 ...

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 ...