Terry Eagleton— All art has a political dimension, but tragedy actually began life as a political institution. Indeed, for Hannah Arendt it is the political art par excellence. Only in theatre, she writes, ‘is the political sphere of human life transposed into art’. In fact, ancient Greek tragedy is not
Thomas Waters— Witchcraft differed from one region to the next, but it also varied over much shorter distances. Certain desolate, inhospitable or generally ominous locations were known as the favoured haunts of witches. Prolley Moor in Shropshire was a notorious meeting place for practitioners of the dark arts, as was
Robert Philip— Of all the composers from continental Europe who settled in England over the centuries, Handel was the one who achieved the greatest celebrity, becoming established as a quintessentially ‘English’ composer. He first became famous as a writer of operas in Germany and Italy, then moved to England in
Pekka Hamalainen— In 1776 two nations were born in North America. One was conceived in Philadelphia, the other in the Black Hills of South Dakota, and they were separated by more than seventeen hundred miles. Exactly a century later those two nations would clash violently along the Little Bighorn River
Christopher Marquis— In 2012, the late Lynn Stout, a renowned legal scholar at Cornell Law School, published The Shareholder Value Myth: How Putting Shareholders First Harms Investors, Corporations, and the Public, a no-holds-barred exposé of the lies the corporate world tells itself about shareholder primacy and an explanation of why
Robert Holland— On 16 August 1822, it took Lord George Byron, his friend Edward Trelawny, a gaggle of Tuscan soldiers and a local health official an hour to find the spot on the beach near Viareggio where Percy Bysshe Shelley’s corpse had been left two weeks before in the burning
The latest work from Nobel laureate Patrick Modiano, Invisible Ink is a spellbinding tale of memory and its illusions. Private detective Jean Eyben receives an assignment to locate a missing woman, the mysterious Noëlle Lefebvre. While the case proves fruitless, the clues Jean discovers along the way continue to haunt him.
Cees Nooteboom— When you hear the word inquisition, you think of Spain, heretics in strange tall pointed hats, the stake, forced confessions, horrifying images that make the words Holy Inquisition a cruel oxymoron. It is less well known that there were also inquisitors in Venice who could make life rather
Michael Peppiatt— Even if Paris lost its prominence as the art centre of the world around the mid-twentieth century (with existentialism waning and Abstract Expressionism on the rise), everything in the French capital operated as if nothing had changed a decade later when I began writing gallery ‘round-ups’ for various
Antawan I. Byrd and Felicia Mings— In South Africa separate and unequal access to education, health, and economic opportunity long predated the 1948 implementation of apartheid law—as did resistance to such conditions on the part of Black, Indian, and Colored (multiracial) women. Starting in the early twentieth century, women rallied