The Fifth Republic’s deteriorating fiscal situation offers the strongest parallel with the waning years of the Ancien Régime.

The reissue of Hamilton and Cairns’ celebrated edition of Plato’s dialogues shows how every translation bears the marks of its era and of its translator’s taste. Anselm Feuerbach, Plato's Symposium, ...

A century ago, a Baltic fishing village began its transformation into a bustling port. Gdynia embodied interwar Poland’s modernising ambitions, but it could not guarantee the country’s security. The ...

Russia’s rulers have long met outbreaks of disease with secrecy, at catastrophic cost to their own citizens. The official response to a plague-researcher’s death in Siberia follows the same pattern.

Jürgen Habermas' enduring work began in the coffee-houses of Georgian London. His deepest insight was, in the end, a conservative one. German philosopher Jürgen Habermas in the auditorium of the ...

For many, the advent of printing was nothing short of miraculous but for others it symbolised a scandalous cheapening of knowledge. Aldus Pius Manutius (1449-1515) an Italian humanist. Engraving by ...

The American journalist's account of the Hiroshima bombing and its aftermath, told through the eyes of Japanese survivors, forced the world to reckon with the terrifying power of nuclear weapons. John ...

What happened in California in the 1970s played an outsized role in creating the world we live in today – both in the United States and in large parts of the globe – for better or worse. It is not an ...

As the global economic order continues to fracture, President Xi Jinping is doubling down on China's mercantilist model, deepening Beijing's domestic problems while fuelling discontent among ...

The annual conferences held by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps reveal a worldview that is dependent on continued confrontation with the West. An anti-American mural painting along the wall of ...

James Marriott's polemic 'The New Dark Ages' mourns the passing of the print age. But it oversells the triumphs of mass literacy, and says too little about the costs. A detail from an illustration by ...

Whenever societies sink into decadence and decline, the ever fascinating figure of the dandy is swift to emerge. Poet and novelist, Oscar Wilde, (1854-1900), in his typical costume of a velvet robe ...