Benjamin T. Smith’s books include The Roots of Conservatism in Mexico: Catholicism, society, and politics in the Mixteca Baja, 1750-1962, 2012. His most recent book is The Dope: The real history of ...

I confessed in an earlier post that I was skipping the inauguration in Washington DC and spending a few nights in New York. (I can totally recommend the just-ending Siena exhibition at the Met, which ...

Minoo Dinshaw’s subject is a friendship which thrived before the civil wars of the mid-seventeenth century, and was broken by them. Edward Hyde, the royalist statesman and historian who became Earl of ...

In 1916, Isaac Babel, who did more than anyone to put his Ukrainian hometown on the literary map, began one of his first published pieces with an admission: “Odesa is a nasty place. Everybody knows ...

Today Albert Einstein is, literally speaking, nowhere. Almost all of him (setting aside the unfortunate story of his purloined brain) was cremated and the ashes were distributed on the waters of the ...

Stepping out of his apartment block in Paris’s chic sixteenth arrondissement, the filmmaker Robert Bristol narrowly avoids being hit by a falling man. What is more, this man is stark naked. The man ...

Occupied Words is a study of how the Yiddish language was reforged in the crucible of the Holocaust. Hannah Pollin-Galay’s book is divided into three sections. The first concerns the various lexica of ...

Over the past thirty years, English football has undergone a complete transformation. In 1992, twenty-two clubs broke away from the Football League to create a new entity, the Premier League. It has ...

Speaking of her late husband, Valerie Eliot once remarked “He felt he had paid too much to be a poet, that he had suffered too much”. Given how little of the poet’s time was spent actually producing ...

“Standing in the full / glare of the war, I’m a surface / reflecting its awesome light”, Oksana Maksymchuk declares in Still City, her debut English-language collection. The key phrase comes next: ...

Patrick Clarke’s biography of the synth-pop duo Soft Cell is, he explains, “a book written from a distance”. Not yet born when the band rose to prominence in the early 1980s, Clarke only became a fan ...

Central Europe has seldom been short of dissidents. Their names are celebrated in its crowded pantheons of national heroes: defenders of religious freedom, peasant tribunes, revolutionary Jacobins, ...