"Would you like to see an opera?" asks my girlfriend Junqing during my recent visit to Shanghai. I hesitate. Chinese opera has always struck me as somewhere on a par with fried locusts and sumo wrestling - part of life's rich tapestry, no doubt, but otherwise best avoided. Its bangs and shrieks defeat all efforts at cross-cultural understanding. But Junqing is a fan, and so, for her sake, I smile [...]

About a hundred years ago, a group of artists embarked on that unprecedented adventure known as modernism. Critics and philosophers were soon on hand with explanations and justifications. Realist painting was denounced as "a pale reflex of actual appearance" requiring no more than "technical capacity in the imitation of nature". The true aim of art, it was declared, is not the depiction of actual forms, but the expression of feeling, [...]

"Under the pretext of 'profit', 'economic development', 'culture', our civilisation is intent on the destruction of life. It attacks it in all its forms, cuts down forests, extinguishes species, wipes out indigenous peoples . . . and degrades those living creatures which it spares into mere merchandise, into the marked objects of an unlimited greed."

Who is the author of this passage? Naomi Klein or George Monbiot? No. It comes [...]

It seems odd to talk about the "idea" of art. Isn't art a basic human impulse, like eating or making love? Haven't we always told stories, banged drums and decorated walls?

Perhaps, but the idea of art is a recent and rather peculiar innovation. Visit the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow and you may see babushkas bowing and crossing themselves before the icons on display. They have failed to realise that [...]

Ruben Gallego was born in Moscow in 1968 without hands or feet. He was packed off to an orphanage, then later to an old people's home, where he was left to die. Somehow he survived. White on Black is his story. It won the Russian Booker Prize in 2003.

Nothing typified the Soviet Union so much as its treatment of the handicapped. Laziness, indifference and bureaucratic stupidity achieved what in [...]

Animals have long functioned as emblems of the virtues and vices. Everyone knows that lions are brave, dogs faithful and rats treacherous. Most of these analogies owe more to human prejudice than to close observation of the species in question; rats do not rat on each other and wolves are far from wolfish. But once fossilised in language, the symbolism is hard to dislodge.

Every new discovery in the field [...]

If Christianity had a mission in the 19th century, it was to restrain the leviathan of the nation state. This book tells the story of its failure. Across Europe, churches were expropriated, corrupted and exploited by more powerful civic structures, and ended the century weaker and smaller than they began it. The stage was set for the horrors of the next hundred years, the godless age par excellence.

Michael Burleigh [...]

Children have always had much to endure from adults, but few more than Hans-Georg Behr, author of these reminiscences of 1940s Austria. The son of a high-ranking Nazi, Behr had the dubious privilege of having his cheeks pinched by Uncles Hermann, Joseph and Albert, and even enjoyed an audience with the Fuhrer. Most of his infancy, however, was spent far away in rural Austria, as a prisoner of his mother's [...]

Simon Blackburn, professor of philosophy at Cambridge University, is feeling harassed. What troubles him is "the minds of other people". Astrology, feng shui, Christianity and other manifestations of mass irrationality are flourishing shamelessly. "If only people would be sensible. If only they would submit to the order of reason." However, what really irks Blackburn is not these popular aberrations, but that intellectual sophistry - variously labelled multiculturalism, postmodernism or relativism [...]

I am walking down Kastanienallee, centre of hip Berlin. It is already dark; candles flicker through cafe windows. Inside the cafes, young people sip coffees and listen to strange electronic music. I suppress a pang of envy. My destination is the freezing annex of an art-house cinema, where every fortnight I and other votaries meet to pursue what Kant called the "adventure of reason". This is Philosophie Direkt, a noble [...]