“Nobody knows anything,” the screenwriter William Goldman once said. “Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work”, Which means it’s a wonder that any ...

On a cold December day in 1962, Nikita Khrushchev stepped outside the Kremlin to see some art. The occasion was the thirtieth anniversary of the Moscow Artists’ Union, an official Soviet institution ...

Though a talented poet, Rebecca Watts remains best known for her essay “The Cult of the Noble Amateur”, published in the poetry journal PN Review in 2018. It was ironic that this piece attracted much ...

In April 1576, James Burbage, a joiner turned actor, signed a lease on a half-acre patch of land in Shoreditch. The district was conveniently located outside the walls of the City of London, with its ...

Oba Electroplating Factory is the fourth instalment of Drawn and Quarterly’s seven-volume Complete Mature Works of Yoshiharu Tsuge series. It is a collection of seven short pieces published in 1973–4, ...

Philip Terry’s Dante’s Purgatorio comes a decade after his version of the Inferno. That was set in the University of Essex; this is set on Mersea Island, which makes one wonder: where will his ...

According to Scott G. Bruce, our “inner demons” represent the “last vestige” of more traditional ideas of an infernal hierarchy. The texts in his Penguin Book of Demons predate this inward turn, ...

Germany’s reputation of “having confronted its Nazi past with impressive forthrightness”, as stated by Lawrence Douglas in his excellent review of Jack Fairweather’s biography of Fritz Bauer (March 28 ...

The life of Jeremy Catto, a tutor in medieval history at Oriel College, Oxford, from 1970 until his retirement in 2006, opens a window onto a lost world. In the pressure cooker of modern uni­versity ...

During a speech in Florida in February 2025, Donald Trump reflected on the devastating power of nuclear weapons. “The power is so enormous”, he declared. “You ...