“If you see me on the scaffolding of a house under construction … I’m Mario Fagiolo. If, instead, you see me belly up in the field, tickling the clouds with a blade of grass between my teeth, make no ...

One of my gigs here in Washington DC was, just a few days ago, at the Kennedy Center (a cultural centre launched by President Eisenhower, supported by JFK and eventually becoming a memorial to him).

Benjamin T. Smith’s books include The Roots of Conservatism in Mexico: Catholicism, society, and politics in the Mixteca Baja, 1750-1962, 2012. His most recent book is The Dope: The real history of ...

I confessed in an earlier post that I was skipping the inauguration in Washington DC and spending a few nights in New York. (I can totally recommend the just-ending Siena exhibition at the Met, which ...

In 1916, Isaac Babel, who did more than anyone to put his Ukrainian hometown on the literary map, began one of his first published pieces with an admission: “Odesa is a nasty place. Everybody knows ...

There is little more personal than a recipe. Not those that fill cookbooks and magazines, honed, tested and edited by professionals. But rather those recipes that are passed on informally, and which ...

Today Albert Einstein is, literally speaking, nowhere. Almost all of him (setting aside the unfortunate story of his purloined brain) was cremated and the ashes were distributed on the waters of the ...

Occupied Words is a study of how the Yiddish language was reforged in the crucible of the Holocaust. Hannah Pollin-Galay’s book is divided into three sections. The first concerns the various lexica of ...

Stepping out of his apartment block in Paris’s chic sixteenth arrondissement, the filmmaker Robert Bristol narrowly avoids being hit by a falling man. What is more, this man is stark naked. The man ...

In the title work of Voices of the Fallen Heroes, a newly selected and translated collection of short stories by Yukio Mishima, we encounter a young, blind priest who, in a shamanic rite, is used to ...

Over the past thirty years, English football has undergone a complete transformation. In 1992, twenty-two clubs broke away from the Football League to create a new entity, the Premier League. It has ...

Book titles that begin “The Treasury of …” suggest a box that you open to find jewels inside. The Treasury of Folklore: Waterlands, wooded worlds and starry skies looks and feels like a heavy box, its ...