I’m an avid reader of Donleavy's novels of the sexual picaresque, though I suppose that, as a femininist, I should be ashamed of myself. A new one, Schultz, and the re-issue of The Onion Eaters (1971) ...

In 1962, Martin Heidegger went on a cruise to the Aegean. Going to Greece had not been an easy decision. Seven years earlier he had got so far as to buy train and boat tickets; when the enormity of ...

In the nine centuries since his death, El Cid has been presented as a prototypical crusader, a paragon of religious toleration and the progenitor of a united Spain. David Abulafia goes in search of ...

One of my journalism professors, a gruff newspaper editor named Klaus Pohle, once posed a question about mass media that is both critical and unresolvable: where does the public interest end and the ...

Donald Trump himself and Trump-friendly elements of the US media have long promoted the legend that before turning to politics he was one of America’s greatest entrepreneurs, with a Midas touch in New ...

Using black-and-white photographs printed directly onto the page, Hornby found a playful, metatextual way to illustrate his ...

The American novelist Helen Phillips’s speculative thriller The Need (2019) was longlisted for the National Book Award. The technique of mixing ordinary life with futuristic elements proved so ...

At the start of Mammoth, the third novel in the Catalan writer Eva Baltasar’s ‘triptych’, the unnamed narrator organises a party in order to trick a man (any man) into having sex with her. She wants ...

There is a photograph of Mies van der Rohe talking to King Alfonso XIII of Spain. It was taken in May 1929 during the opening ceremony for Mies’s German Pavilion, built for that year’s World Fair in ...

A little like socks, umbrellas and spectacles, gardens have a habit of getting lost. In fact you could argue that every garden is a ‘lost garden’ in waiting. But gardens can be resilient too. Even an ...

In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue. The oft-repeated rhyme memorialises the moment that the Atlantic, and what lay beyond, entered the realms of Western historiography. A more expansive view of ...

If humanity were to achieve the perfect society, would we actually be able to tolerate it? This is one of the imponderables of utopian thinking. Written between 1927 and 1929, Andrey Platonov’s debut ...