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 ...

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.

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 ...