Does the term “South Sea Annuity” ring a bell? There is no reason why it should. It is a recondite feature of eighteenth-century government finances, when Britain, engaged in the “Second Hundred Years ...

Does it matter who wrote the books we love? I was recently asked to talk about Elsa Morante (1912–85) at the Italian Cultural Institute in London. The idea was to present her fiction in a celebration ...

440pp. Princeton University Press. £35 (US $39.95). Stephanie Sandler “The plot always thickens in winter / All roads lead right to it”, says a voice in Maria Stepanova’s book-length poem Holy Winter ...

“When you’ve got no money problems and plenty of health problems, you end up living a very chaste sort of existence”, explains the narrator of Saou Ichikawa’s debut novel, Hunchback. “In another life, ...

The 250th anniversary of the death of Oliver Goldsmith at the age of forty-five passed last year with little comment or commemoration. But at Trinity College Dublin and the Irish embassy in London, ...

“Oh, I thought you were a man!” were the words uttered by the pioneering nuclear physicist Ernest Rutherford when he first met Lise Meitner, the scientist who would go on to discover nuclear fission.

Frances Tanzer’s innovative and insightful approach to the postwar cultural reinvention of Vienna focuses on artists, exhibitions, cafés, cabarets, comedy and the presence of Jews – real and ephemeral ...

Do we really need another account of how capitalism and gender stereotypes operate together to create and maintain inequality between men and women? Feminist economists have made this case since the ...

The problem with making the Dead Sea the centre of a historical narrative is that nobody has ever had much enthusiasm for the protagonist. In this sweeping and ambitious account, Nir Arielli has done ...

In his review of Turner and Constable: Art, life, landscape by Nicola Moorby (April 4), Ben Street quotes Constable’s claim that painting is a “branch of natural philosophy of which pictures are but ...