In Pablo Picasso’s portrait of Aimé Césaire, drawn after they met at the Soviet-organized World Congress of Intellectuals in Defence of Peace in Poland in August 1948, a man with a long, thin neck and ...

“Few writers are able to create a different world for you to live in”, the TLS said of a new novel, in 1963, “yet Miss [Victoria] Lucas in The Bell Jar has done just this.” This was quite a debut, ...

The title of Isabel Galleymore’s second collection of poems is a translation of Konrad Lorenz’s term Kindenschema – that is, the wide-eyed, round-faced quality that makes us Ah and Aw. Cuteness ...

April Balascio recounted details of her father’s murders in the true crime podcast The Clearing (2019), but the focus in her memoir Raised by a Serial Killer is on the quandary of a daughter’s mixture ...

“The need to go home … hit me like grief”. Mairéad, the protagonist of Elaine Garvey’s debut novel, is experiencing the feeling of bereavement that often comes when, at the brink of “proper” adulthood ...

In 2011, builders in the Rio de Janeiro docklands uncovered the ruins of the Cais do Valongo, a wharf where, between 1780 and ...

Paul Celan, originally from Czernowitz in Romania (now in Ukraine), was a Holocaust survivor and arguably the greatest postwar German-language poet. He met the French aristocrat, artist and printmaker ...

Early in 1943, Maria Mandl, the tyrannical, sadistic unofficial head guard at the women’s camp in Auschwitz, decided that the moment had come to form a women’s orchestra. Fiercely jealous of her male ...

When it came to creature comforts, Ithell Colquhoun did not require much. Scouting around Penzance for a suitable studio-cum-domicile following the breakdown of her marriage in 1947, she chanced, as ...

he has gnawed all the gray meat from. to be boy and flesh. He rides it into the sunset at the speed of forgiveness. All the pig energy in his face, he examines my nervous fluorescence afraid I will ...

In the autumn of 1900, the twenty-four-year-old Rainer Maria Rilke was suffering from writer’s block. He had recently returned from the second of two trips to Russia, and it was beginning to dawn on ...

Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, murdered in his cathedral in 1170 after seven years of bitter quarrel with his old friend Henry II, is one of the most well-known and well-documented figures ...