In 1935 Varian Fry arrived in Berlin as a newly minted Harvard graduate, eager to report on the escalating political unrest that had gripped Germany since Hitler’s rise to power. He was unprepared for ...

Depending on where your interests lie, Robert Aickman (1914–81) is notable either as co-founder and champion of the Inland Waterways Association, a group which at their inaugural meeting in 1946 made ...

A “koe” is a cry or a shriek. It can be, for example, the cry of a kiwi from the bush. Māori names for birds are often homonyms for the sounds they make. So “kiwi” is not unlike that bird’s “koe”. In ...

It has been more than twenty years since Rachel Cusk upset the applecart of parenting literature with her stark, uncompromising memoir A Life’s Work (2001), which Anne Enright soon followed with the ...

Mary Wollstonecraft – an unmarried, middle-class Englishwoman without a formal education – secured her place in the canon of political and economic theory by writing the first book-length response to ...

In 1977 Ted Hughes published the first selection of Sylvia Plath’s prose in Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams. Two years later he added a new cache of her work to an expanded second edition. Twenty ...

For such small fish, anchovies pack a big punch. They can be eaten on their own or as part of almost any dish, from pasta sauces to vinaigrettes. Yet for every person who loves them there will be ...

In 2023 France celebrated 150 years since the birth of Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, a writer who enthralled readers with frank, provocative explorations of desire, friendship and other pleasures of the ...

It is said that after tobacco arrived from the New World in the late sixteenth century, Queen Elizabeth took a discreet pull on a clay pipe before deciding against smoking. James I’s reaction was even ...