“The plot always thickens in winter / All roads lead right to it”, says a voice in Maria Stepanova’s book-length poem Holy Winter 20/21. For the Russian writer and intellectual, the winter in question ...

How should we live? How should society be arranged? Utilitarians believe that such questions reduce to one simple principle: the better action (or policy, or social institution) is the one that brings ...

To Albert Camus, Amsterdam’s concentric waterways resembled the circles of hell. His protagonist in The Fall (1956), a “judge- penitent” who whiles away his days in a seedy sailors’ bar on the Zeedijk ...

Some debates just run and run. Adam Smith, the father of modern economics, thought that the economic inefficiency of slavery acted as a drag anchor on growth. In the other corner, Karl Marx argued in ...

Born in Cuba under colonial rule, the revolutionary writer José Martí died fighting Spanish royalists at the Battle of Dos Ríos in 1895. His life and writings were informed by strict humanitarian ...

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“If you see me on the scaffolding of a house under construction … I’m Mario Fagiolo. If, instead, you see me belly up in the field, tickling the clouds with a blade of grass between my teeth, make no ...

Stepping out of his apartment block in Paris’s chic sixteenth arrondissement, the filmmaker Robert Bristol narrowly avoids being hit by a falling man. What is more, this man is stark naked. The man ...

If you’re thinking of leaving your house to the nation for the purposes of literary heritage, think carefully. In NB of July 29, we reported on the saga of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s place in Kardamyli in ...

Living in a rural commune in the late 1970s and 1980s, Susanna Crossman became adept at knowing how to behave in the presence of outsiders. Journalists from newspapers, radio and TV regularly came to ...

The Reformation scholar Patrick Collinson once noted that “no-one has dared write a biography of [Robert] Beale”. There were good reasons. Second-tier administrators rarely make exciting biographical ...