Benjamin T. Smith’s books include The Roots of Conservatism in Mexico: Catholicism, society, and politics in the Mixteca Baja, 1750-1962, 2012. His most recent book is The Dope: The real history of ...

I confessed in an earlier post that I was skipping the inauguration in Washington DC and spending a few nights in New York. (I can totally recommend the just-ending Siena exhibition at the Met, which ...

Boris Dralyuk on a compelling portrait of the Black Sea port of Odesa, past and present; Russell Williams is put in mind of the rumpled TV detective Columbo by a pacy French novel Vanessa Curtis is ...

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 ...

Over the past thirty years, English football has undergone a complete transformation. In 1992, twenty-two clubs broke away from the Football League to create a new entity, the Premier League. It has ...

Today Albert Einstein is, literally speaking, nowhere. Almost all of him (setting aside the unfortunate story of his purloined brain) was cremated and the ashes were distributed on the waters of the ...

Like much of Domenico Starnone’s fiction, this short novel is set in the author’s native Naples. It begins in 1952, when the narrator, Mimí, is eight, unhappy and obsessed with two things: the girl on ...

Speaking of her late husband, Valerie Eliot once remarked “He felt he had paid too much to be a poet, that he had suffered too much”. Given how little of the poet’s time was spent actually producing ...

Occupied Words is a study of how the Yiddish language was reforged in the crucible of the Holocaust. Hannah Pollin-Galay’s book is divided into three sections. The first concerns the various lexica of ...

This is the second new book that David Graeber, the anthropologist and anarchist, has published since his death aged fifty-nine in late 2020, and that his thoughts continue to surprise, challenge and ...

“Standing in the full / glare of the war, I’m a surface / reflecting its awesome light”, Oksana Maksymchuk declares in Still City, her debut English-language collection. The key phrase comes next: ...

Book titles that begin “The Treasury of …” suggest a box that you open to find jewels inside. The Treasury of Folklore: Waterlands, wooded worlds and starry skies looks and feels like a heavy box, its ...