Angry advocate of violence and sombre prophet of the anti-colonial struggle, Frantz Fanon was also a natty dresser and enjoyed a gin-and-tonic. A black, middle-class psychiatrist from Martinique, who ...

Hubert Wolf is a distinguished German ecclesiastical historian whose study of the nuns of Sant’Ambrogio was first published in German in 2013. It has been quickly translated and it is easy to see why.

Crim con is one of those great eighteenth-century terms. Jaunty and crisp, it sounds like it must be a lot of fun, whatever it means. The unabbreviated phrase, criminal conversation, is a euphemism ...

When I first came to west Cornwall in the 1960s Barbara Hepworth’s small, dark, intense figure seemed as much part of the landscape of St Ives as the sculptures she made to adorn it. Her decision to ...

Among the bombings that marked the beginning of 2017, one took place on New Year’s Day at the CasaPound bookshop in Florence, an outpost of the Italian neo-fascist or ‘alt-right’ CasaPound movement, ...

This collection of stories forms a Gulag memoir to rival Solzhenitsyn’s, as Solzhenitsyn himself acknowledged. Between 1954 and 1973, after fifteen years spent mainly in the camps of the Kolyma region ...

Christopher Hitchens: Despite Those Eyelashes, He Blew It - Some Times in America by Alexander Chancellor ...

The days when LSD made headlines as ‘The Most Dangerous Thing Since the Atom Bomb’ are long gone; now we’re in a ‘Psychedelic Renaissance’, with Prince Harry drinking ayahuasca tea and Mike Tyson ...

The title of Miranda Seymour’s vastly enjoyable new book is misleading. It suggests that Byron’s wife and daughter tumbled about in the slipstream of a volcanic genius. Yet although there was no ...

Who was Charles de Gaulle? Stop the clock in 1939 and he was an eccentric army officer. Stop it in July 1940, after he had flown to London, and he was claiming to represent France against the Vichy ...

I love yakuza movies. Robert Mitchum and Takakura Ken, the man who never smiles, in the 1974 flick The Yakuza; ‘Beat’ Takeshi Kitano’s deadpan outings, from Violent Cop to Hana-bi; anything by Takashi ...

The Past centres on four adult siblings and their families as they gather at their late grandparents’ country house for the summer. It opens with one sibling worrying whether strangers might think she ...