It is timely, in these days of Extinction Rebellion and anti-aviation protests, to examine the philosophy of travel. Why do we go, what do we get out of it, and is the very act of boarding a plane ...

Fiona MacCarthy met Walter Gropius (1883–1969) through Jack Pritchard, the British entrepreneur who built Lawn Road Flats in Hampstead, an experiment in modernist living where Gropius took up ...

I was telling my friend Moon Biglow the other day that I was going to Hampstead to see some literary people. ‘Oh, littery people,’ said Moon – because that’s how he talks. ‘Oh, Hampstead!’ said Moon. ...

Dani is a successful singer who is taking his father’s body from Madrid to be buried in the village where he was brought up. For the forty-year-old, it’s a trip to a Spain he doesn’t know. It’s ...

Yu Hua, an author new to me, has written a great deal, sells well in China, and has a sizeable international reputation. This is his first non-fiction work translated – and very nimbly, too, by Allan ...

The day after Putin invaded Ukraine, a Russian friend wrote to me that she was feeling something she had never felt, or expected to feel, in her life. She was, she said, feeling the fear, horror, ...

In the Penguin translation of Catullus two words are left untranslated. ‘Pedicabo et irrumabo vos’, writes the poet of his foes Furius and Aurelius and ‘pedicabo et irrumabo vos’ is how it stays in ...

When Hannah Arendt looked at the man wearing an ill-fitting suit in the bulletproof dock inside a Jerusalem courtroom in 1961, she saw something different from everybody else. The prosecution, writes ...

Last year Finneas O’Connell, the brother and creative partner of Billie Eilish, released a poignant song called ‘The 90s’, which fixated on a decade ‘when the future was a testament/To something ...

For some time, Anglo-American historians have been obsessed with the G word. The word is not ‘God’ but ‘global’. Using it, we have learned to tell a self-comforting story. Until recently, we begin, we ...

Wolfgang Münchau has, for more than thirty years, been one of the most acute and penetrating commentators on the European Union, writing in the Financial Times, the New Statesman and elsewhere. What I ...

In 1843, two years before her death at the age of seventy-two, Cassandra Austen told her brother Charles that she had been ‘looking over & destroying some of my Papers’, but was keeping ‘a few letters ...