The artist Chaim Soutine was obsessed with Rembrandt’s painting of a flayed and headless ox. After managing at the age of ...

The prosperity of Asante, in present-day Ghana, was built in part on abundant deposits of precious metal. The British colony ...

The General Strike of 1926 by Jonathan Schneer; The Edge of Revolution: The General Strike That Shook Britain by David ...

Laura Cumming’s wonderful, haunting new book slips between genres. It is not quite a memoir, not quite a biography and not straightforwardly an investigation into the past. But this ambiguity fits the ...

What makes reading Margaret Atwood such fun is her gift for enjoying herself so thoroughly as she writes. She makes you share her zest for words, people, jokes, sharp-edged description and endless ...

If Brazil is not for beginners, as the composer Tom Jobim once said, Rio de Janeiro often feels as if requires postdoctoral-level skills to penetrate. Like in mid-century Los Angeles, Rio’s seemingly ...

Shame Has to Change Sides by Gisèle Pelicot with Judith Perrignon (Translated from French by Natasha Lehrer & Ruth Diver) ...

The wider circumpolar region is rich in oil, gas, metals and minerals, while thawing ice has increased the navigability of ...

William Boyd’s novel Restless, winner of the 2006 Costa Novel Award, describes the adventures of Eva, a young Russian émigrée, who is recruited for the British Secret Service during the Second World ...

Baby-making has become ‘a capitalist’s wet dream’, writes journalist Alev Scott in Cash Cow. Although the subject has been much explored by scholars, Scott comes at it a little differently – initially ...

Venice and the Jews by Alexander Lee ...