Moscow, to western eyes, does not look much like Rome. But if there is any country in the world where the tug of the Roman ideal can be felt, it is Russia.
Each of us has over a hundred billion cells in our brain, comparable to the number of stars in a giant galaxy. The cerebral cortex is our liberation.
Something changed in me during my trip to Edinburgh. It is hard to articulate the subtle, often contradictory emotions that constitute a sense of national identity.
Nobody should have to play the frightened victim to make basic choices about her future.
At the peak of its popularity, Mao's bible was the most printed book in the world. It attained the status of a sacred, holy text during the Cultural Revolution, and retains its place among western devotees.
How a rape accusation has destroyed the Socialist Workers Party – whose members have included Christopher Hitchens and Paul Foot – and provoked a crisis on the far left.
The elements of Rachel Holmes's biography of Karl Mark's daughter Eleanor that survived the abridger’s pen on Radio 4 were well worth tuning in for.
England has had its share of terrorist bombings, economic crises, political reshuffles, the Olympic Games, and so on – but the basic “grammar” of Englishness hasn’t changed.
We now cannot think of the Yorkshire moors without Emily Brontë, but we must reclaim our moors from cream teas and see them from the vantage point of the raptors wheeling overhead.
The sophomore novel from the author of story collections A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and Gold Boy, Emerald Girl.
Lynn Barber's A Curious Career is a curious concoction, a mixture of retold stories and reprinted interviews from a writer who has always been better at writing about other people rather than herself.
When we think about writing about Spain's civil war, we go first to Orwell's Homage to Catalonia or Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls. Why were Spanish authors mistrusted?
In A Touch of Sin, the ordinarily placid and reflective Chinese director Jia Zhangke bloodies his hands - creating technicolour violence from real, grisly stories which take aim at social injustice in China.
Given the absence of jokes, tension, consequence - and the presence of Matt LeBlanc - what is there to keep the audience of Episodes on its side?
From Larkin’s diaries being burnt to the refusal to acknowledge forgotten Jackson Pollocks, literary and art executors run a tight ship.
The Brazilians have won five World Cups, more than anybody else. So why was there rioting last summer when teams arrived for a warm-up? Brazil's relationship with football has never been an easy romance.
A Letter Home was recorded in a Voice-O-Graph booth in Jack White’s “novelties lounge”. With cover songs and lo-fi crackles, it is an object study in the pros and cons of retro audio porn.
It took Akhil Sharma 13 years to write his second novel: a bildungsroman with a family tragedy at its core. It was worth the wait, writes Philip Maughan.
If I make any oath of alliegance to honour my mother's nationality, it's to the American pancake, not the president.
A swift death and antimacassars that turned into faceless people meant that Aubrey and Brenda never got to take the holiday they craved.
That my children actually want to see me, after years of my not even remotely bursting into tears of pride whenever I contemplated them, is one of the nicest surprises that this existence has granted to me.
A good season for facial hair, a bad one for puns.
Reams have been written about the British empire, but one culprit in the colonisation project has yet to receive its fair share of blame.
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