Gardens feature in every genre of Roman literature, from obscene epigrams to dry agricultural treatises, though often in the background or on the margins – as the setting for Cicero’s philosophical ...

640pp. University of Chicago Press. £32 (US $39.95). In 2011, builders in the Rio de Janeiro docklands uncovered the ruins of the Cais do Valongo, a wharf where, between 1780 and 1831, 800,000 ...

“Few passions are constant, but many are sincere”. The maxim is by the Marquis de Vauvenargues, one-time proprietor of the Provençal chateau where Pablo Picasso and his second wife, Jacqueline Roque, ...

Caroline Moorehead salutes the energetic brilliance of the singer Josephine Baker and Aaron Peck discusses the past, present and future of the avant garde We're joined by Harriet Baker, the winner of ...

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The Eerie Book is a compendium of supernatural short stories and extracts, edited by the Scottish author Margaret Armour in 1898 and beautifully reproduced with a new introduction by the super­natural ...

The chaos agents who drive Christopher Bollen’s latest thriller belong to two of the most easily overlooked demographics: an old woman and a child. The yawning age gap between the eighty-one-year-old ...

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 ...

Do we really need another retelling of ancient Irish tales? Well, perhaps. Lisa M. Bitel, in her lively and insightful introduction to Otherworld – her own versions of nine stories selected from three ...

The religious landscape in Britain is undergoing significant transformations that remain only partially understood. Statistical data indicate a general trend of declining religiosity, which is in part ...

Will artificial intelligence save us from our worst impulses or damn us to extinction? Building on his previous work about the importance of narrative to large-scale human co-operation, Yuval Noah ...

Next year will mark ten years since the death of the Chilean queer activist, performance artist, novelist and essayist Pedro Lemebel (1952-2015), whom the former Chilean president Michelle Bachelet ...