Film directors usually make the least promising subjects for biography. They tend to stay behind the camera and get on with making films, emerging only to make the odd promotional statement. Only ...

Ring Down the Curtain - The Critic by Anand Tucker (dir) ...

When in 1960 I first came across Osip Mandelstam’s poetry, nobody in the USSR had enjoyed access to his work since the early 1930s and few even knew of his existence, let alone of his death, as he had ...

Yet another book on the origins of the Second World War might seem excessive, but this one takes an original approach. Its focus is on the quality and accuracy of information obtained through ...

In late 2022, at the G20 summit held at a balmy resort in Bali, Indonesia, the prime minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, ...

Fragments of pottery excavated in Poland tell us that around seven thousand years ago Neolithic farmers were transforming milk from sheep, cattle and goats into a solid food that could feed them in ...

When Hannah Arendt looked at the man wearing an ill-fitting suit in the bulletproof dock inside a Jerusalem courtroom in 1961, she saw something different from everybody else. The prosecution, writes ...

There’s plenty wrong with rights, Nigel Biggar tells us, as some very powerful thinkers have been saying since the ‘rights of man and of the citizen’ first entered the lexicon of mass democratic ...

In 1978, the critic Hugh Kenner coined the term ‘the Uncle Charles Principle’ to describe a particular literary realist technique. Kenner was responding to Wyndham Lewis, who in 1927 criticised James ...

The good news is that we’re all doomed. Humankind has made such a hash of the stewardship of creation that God looks like a chump for entrusting it to us. Most of the biosphere would be better off ...

The German Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) was fortunate in his initials. The stylised ‘AD’ that he routinely inserted into his paintings and engravings, and even the preparatory ...

Shehan Karunatilaka’s freewheeling debut, Chinaman, won a clutch of awards in 2010. In it, a cynical, drink-soaked narrator tries to track down a possibly dead cricketer in a Sri Lanka riven by civil ...