400pp. Allen Lane. £25.

Frances Tanzer’s innovative and insightful approach to the postwar cultural reinvention of Vienna focuses on artists, exhibitions, cafés, cabarets, comedy and the presence of Jews – real and ephemeral ...

In the late ninth century, an anonymous scribe in Aquitaine compiled a collection of thirty-one Latin poems. Among them is a lament by the Frankish poet Angelbert, accompanied by an early form of ...

To return or not to return? That is the question that has defined the long-running debate around the sculptures made almost 2,500 years ago to adorn the buildings of the Acropolis of Athens. They tend ...

“From my youth onwards”, wrote the Viennese Jewish philosopher Martin Buber in 1950, “I have found in Jesus my great brother.” Buber was one of many Jewish and Christian thinkers who reflected on ...

In autumn 1988, I travelled by ferry from Helsinki to the Soviet Socialist Republic of Estonia – a four-hour crossing over the Gulf of Finland. The reformist Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev had ...

The most impressive fact about the Spanish film-maker Albert Serra’s fragmented memoir, A Toast to St Martirià, is that its central essay came from a speech that was “entirely improvised”, according ...

Nikko is a small mountain town two hours north of Tokyo, where towering cedars erupt from scraggly ravines and a green-blue river gallops beneath a 300-year-old lacquered bridge. High above the town, ...