If I say that I used to be very afraid of Enoch Powell, I think a certain proportion of Literary Review readers will guess what I mean. To be a socialist in the 1960s was to know that, even as the ...

If one goal of modern biography is to lay bare secrets and perversions, then Salvador Dalí must necessarily make a disappointing subject, for he spent a lucrative lifetime laying them all bare himself ...

Last year, visitors to the British Museum’s exhibition ‘Living With Gods’ were greeted by a strange figure carved from a mammoth’s tusk, 31cm tall and 40,000 years old. It had a human body and a ...

The Soviet Union might seem the last place that the art duo Gilbert & George would achieve success. Yet as the communist regime collapsed, that’s precisely what happened. @StephenSmithWDS wonders how ...

There are three rules for avoiding a cinematic flop. Rule one: don’t pick a title that is boring, misleading or hard to pronounce. The title wasn’t the only thing that was bad about the misfiring ...

In the 17th century, the Uffizi offered its visitors a rather more diverse range of exhibits than it does now, among them weapons made by some distant precursor of Q Branch. The Scottish traveller ...

Ever since Thomas Carlyle first launched his Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell on the world in 1845, the Lord Protector’s published words have exercised an almost mesmeric hold on posterity.

Tolerance does not come naturally to humankind. For most of recorded history, what people believed about the natural world, about government and society or about the moral code was laid down by ...

Are the Baltic Sea states, as former Estonian president Lennart Meri once put it, the factory of Europe’s future? Oliver Moody’s brilliantly written, convincingly argued and compelling book makes a ...

The Heart in Winter, Kevin Barry’s first novel in five years, opens in Butte, Montana. It is the last decade of the 19th century and Butte, having been established as a mining camp in 1864, is now on ...

Frederick Augustus (1670–1733), elector of Saxony and king of Poland, owed his sobriquet ‘the Strong’ to such feats as crushing a tin plate in his hand (mentioned by Rilke in the ‘Fifth Duino Elegy’) ...

Tania Branigan reported from Beijing for The Guardian from 2008 until 2015, so Red Memory is part of a long and varied lineage of books about China by foreign correspondents. Most such volumes are of ...