In 1992, Joseph Brodsky published Watermark, a book-length essay that brings together his impressions of Venice in winter – he refused to go there in any other season – and a series of powerful and ...

It has done no favours to the modern reputation of King Frederick II of Prussia – ‘Frederick the Great’ – that Hitler, during the mad final days of the Third Reich, placed the monarch’s portrait above ...

In the Penguin translation of Catullus two words are left untranslated. ‘Pedicabo et irrumabo vos’, writes the poet of his foes Furius and Aurelius and ‘pedicabo et irrumabo vos’ is how it stays in ...

What was a witch? This deceptively simple question has prompted fierce debate among scholars for many years. There are several possible sources of the word, including the Old English wicca (meaning ...

In a Guardian interview to mark his seventieth birthday on 10 September 1973 – scarcely more than a year before he died – Cyril Connolly revealed that he would have been happiest as a poet: ‘I lack ...

Some novels are crafted with such care that it seems a shame reviewers should get to paw them before readers have the chance to admire their intricacy. Evie Wyld’s second novel, All the Birds, Singing ...

Ninety years ago last May, the world’s first black heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson appeared on stage at an Elephant and Castle music hall. The flamboyant Johnson exchanged comic patter with a ...

One of the great mysteries of history is what has sometimes been called the ‘Great Divergence’ and sometimes the ‘Great Enrichment’: the economic takeoff that saw Europe, and subsequently much of the ...

The usual perception of Richard Burton is that he wasted his talent. As legend has it, he was a Shakespearean actor who sold out to the movies and was prepared to act in any old rubbish for the money, ...

Maggie O’Farrell’s fifth novel, The Hand that First Held Mine, confronts the difficulties and wonders of motherhood. Through the lives of two women, Lexie and Elina, living a generation apart, a story ...

Remarkable polymath though he was, Pavel Florensky should not, perhaps, be compared to Leonardo da Vinci. For one thing, he had no patron: Stalin, unlike Cesare Borgia or King Francis I, preferred to ...

Sharon Olds doesn’t need my good opinion; her trophy cabinet is pretty well full. Her first book of poems, Satan Says, won the inaugural San Francisco Poetry Center Award in 1980. Her second, The Dead ...