In the title story of Diabelli – a collection of short fiction by the Swiss writer Hermann Burger (1942–89), first published in 1979 – a washed-up prestidigitator describes the linguistic traits ...

“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.

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When Ezra Pound invited Walter de la Mare to contribute, along with T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, D. H. Lawrence and William Carlos Williams, to Poetry magazine, de la Mare turned him down, choosing ...

In her Reith Lecture in 2017, Hilary Mantel reflected that the historical novelist “works away at the point where what is enacted meets what is dreamed, where politics meets psychology, where private ...

One notable simile in Antony and Cleopatra is uttered by a character of Shakespeare’s own invention, Scarus, according to whom Antony absents himself from ...

A cyclist accusing a driver of getting too close. A quarrel with a man spreading his legs open across two seats of a bus. Kyoto begins with a montage of volatility ripped from the mobile screens of ...

Central Europe has seldom been short of dissidents. Their names are celebrated in its crowded pantheons of national heroes: defenders of religious freedom, peasant tribunes, revolutionary Jacobins, ...

Authorship is a singular business, or is usually thought to be so. We reckon that there are practical justifications for writers’ supposed preference for working alone – although there are also some ...

Norma Clarke explores the world of the eighteenth-century chameleon Mary Robinson; Devoney Looser on a footballer’s passion for Virginia Woolf ...

Leo Tolstoy hoped to finish Anna Karenina quickly. Within a year of beginning the novel in early 1873, he was already looking forward to its rapid publication in book form. The entire “carcass” of ...

It is December 25, 1975. Maria Gabriela Llansol writes in her diary of meditation, chickens, her dog, of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Daybreak and the journal kept by the religious historian Mircea Eliade, ...