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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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: ...

This smartly presented story, the first in a dual language series that will feature international authors writing on aspects ...

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 ...

Scholars are difficult subjects for the biographer, since they spend – or fantasize about spending – most of their time at their desks. Jacob Grimm was a particularly reclusive character; his more ...

Like much of Domenico Starnone’s fiction, this short novel is set in the author’s native Naples. It begins in 1952, when the narrator, Mimí, is eight, unhappy and obsessed with two things: the girl on ...

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