September 2022

The French anthropologist Nastassja Martin is lying on a misty Siberian steppe, surrounded by “wads of brown hair stiffened by dried blood.” While she waits for...

The cult of individuality was born amid a melding of minds. Meldings must be preceded by meetings, of course, and the meetings took place in Jena,...

I have over the years met so many Italians who can’t abide The Betrothed (I promessi sposi). They were forced to read it in school, as...

It always feels like an appropriate moment to talk about Buster Keaton, if only because talking about him leads naturally to watching his films and experiencing...

“Hell,” wrote Percy Shelley in 1819, “is a city much like London.” A hundred and twenty years later Bertolt Brecht, who fled the Nazis for Santa...

Sinclair McKay writes at the start of his new book, Berlin, that the city displays its wounds openly, in walls pockmarked by bullets, in ruins and...

In 1326 the women of Florence petitioned the Duchess of Calabria to ask her husband the duke to relax legislation preventing them from wearing false hair,...