Riga

My airport taxi breaknecks through streets of rotting 19th-century wooden houses into Riga's centre. Latvia holds the European record for road deaths. I can see why. From the cab, there is evidence of two simultaneous time zones. One is the dog-end of the Soviet years, the other a frenetic rush towards the high-speed reconstruction of a long-neglected city.

Riga's greatest draw is its pedestrianised Old Town, now a Unesco [...]

In Paris this summer, a new book on French women's sexuality is flying off the shelves. Femme désirée, femme désirante (Woman Desired, Woman Desiring) is by the gynaecologist Danièle Flaumenbaum, and it reveals something surprising. After working with female patients for more than 30 years, she informs us that most of them have never experienced orgasm.

Le Monde gave her revelations a spread and she has been interviewed by French [...]

Gottfried Helnwein's latest exhibition, "Face It", is the artist's first show in his native Austria since 1985. A retrospective of 40 works from the 1970s to the present, it is more shocking than the Royal Academy's infamous "Sensation" of 1997. Helnwein aims to disturb not with, say, an elephant-dung Madonna, as Chris Ofili did then, but with a far more controversial Virgin.

In his last will, the Austrian playwright Thomas [...]

Germany, 1945. As the Allies liberate the country, thousands of Germans rush to bury Mein Kampf in their gardens. The soil of the defeated is, literally, full of Hitler's anti-Semitic ravings. Fifty-six years later, the book cannot be bought or sold in Germany, and it remains buried. Is it time to release the book to a new generation of Germans? Or would the unbanning result in a revival of Hitler's [...]