In 2011, builders in the Rio de Janeiro docklands uncovered the ruins of the Cais do Valongo, a wharf where, between 1780 and ...

Part-way through Natasha Brown’s new novel, Universality, Hannah, a struggling freelance journalist who recently managed to ...

Paul Celan, originally from Czernowitz in Romania (now in Ukraine), was a Holocaust survivor and arguably the greatest postwar German-language poet. He met the French aristocrat, artist and printmaker ...

“The need to go home … hit me like grief”. Mairéad, the protagonist of Elaine Garvey’s debut novel, is experiencing the feeling of bereavement that often comes when, at the brink of “proper” adulthood ...

In the autumn of 1900, the twenty-four-year-old Rainer Maria Rilke was suffering from writer’s block. He had recently returned from the second of two trips to Russia, and it was beginning to dawn on ...

Early in 1943, Maria Mandl, the tyrannical, sadistic unofficial head guard at the women’s camp in Auschwitz, decided that the moment had come to form a women’s orchestra. Fiercely jealous of her male ...

Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, murdered in his cathedral in 1170 after seven years of bitter quarrel with his old friend Henry II, is one of the most well-known and well-documented figures ...

When it came to creature comforts, Ithell Colquhoun did not require much. Scouting around Penzance for a suitable studio-cum-domicile following the breakdown of her marriage in 1947, she chanced, as ...

Few of the notorious haunted houses in fiction are occupied on the basis of annual contracts overseen by a letting agent: usually it is precisely these houses’ unregulated status that has allowed ...

How far is a bridge too far? When a tyrant – fledgling or full-grown – calls on loyalty for actions that contravene the public interest or involve storming a nation’s political sanctuary, what is a ...

This year marks the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea in 325 – undoubtedly a date that would serve as a title for some ecclesiastical version of 1066 and All That. For those who had their ...

On stage, Harriet Walter always conveys sharp intelligence and humour, which is equally characteristic of her books Other People’s Shoes (1999) and Brutus and Other Heroines (2016). In those books ...