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 ...

A person’s proximity to death is often a turning point: an opportunity to reflect on ventures, obsessions and the mistakes of the past before it becomes too late. Martín Caparrós acknowledges this ...

In her Reith Lecture in 2017, Hilary Mantel reflected that the historical novelist “works away at the point where what is enacted meets what is dreamed, where politics meets psychology, where private ...

“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 ...

Germany’s colonial ambitions in Cameroon were short-lived. The region became a protectorate in 1884, under Otto von Bismarck, then in 1916, during the First World War, the colonists were forced to ...

Laura E. Helton’s Scattered and Fugitive Things: How Black collectors created archives and remade history explores the labour and risks involved in assembling the archival collections held across the ...

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 ...

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 ...

This is now the third time Tim Parks has dwelt in print on an error of mine in a translation of a short story by Giorgio Bassani (Letters, April 4), dismaying for the ...