“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 ...

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 ...

Germany enjoys the reputation of having confronted its Nazi past with impressive forthrightness, its cities filled with memorials to the victims of the Holocaust. But when it came to bringing former ...

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 ...

Few of the notorious haunted houses in fiction are occupied on the basis of annual contracts overseen by a letting agent: usually it is precisely these houses’ unregulated status that has allowed ...

On stage, Harriet Walter always conveys sharp intelligence and humour, which is equally characteristic of her books Other People’s Shoes (1999) and Brutus and Other Heroines (2016). In those books ...

This year marks the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea in 325 – undoubtedly a date that would serve as a title for some ecclesiastical version of 1066 and All That. For those who had their ...

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 ...

Between October and December 2024, Mexican security forces detained nearly half a million migrants, most of whom were crossing the country on the way to the US. That’s almost twice the number detained ...

In “Ode to Bread”, Pablo Neruda describes how flour, water and fire combine to create a sort of magic that is both poetic and prosaic, simple and profound. Our daily bread should be “hallowed and ...

In September 2021, the Swedish writer Johanna Ekström was diagnosed with a fatal melanoma of the eye. She was fifty-one and had been writing for thirty years, publishing fourteen books in various ...