Medicine has lost its mojo. To be sure, the technological ingenuity of keyhole surgery is amazing, the previously inconceivable (in vitro fertilisation, curing childhood cancer) is now routine and ...

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A C Grayling has carved out a niche not only as a lucid and accessible interpreter of philosophy for the general reader but also as a passionate advocate for the role that it can and should play in ...

Chil Rajchman was one of only a handful to survive Treblinka. Unlike Auschwitz, Treblinka was purely an extermination camp, where the only Jews not immediately gassed were Sonderkommandos employed in ...

Russia scandalises and confounds Western observers. The lengthy list of entrenched disagreements between the Euro-Atlantic community and Russia over many issues – European security, the war in Syria, ...

How is a totalitarian state like a love affair? They both leave archives behind when they go. How is a totalitarian state like a bad love affair? The archive that survives the end of each is a ...

Laura Cumming’s wonderful, haunting new book slips between genres. It is not quite a memoir, not quite a biography and not straightforwardly an investigation into the past. But this ambiguity fits the ...

If I want to walk along the river near where I live, I have to cross one of the busiest roads in west London. The only access is via an underpass, an enclosed tunnel where a female friend of mine was ...

‘Berlin is a city condemned forever to become, never to be.’ Perhaps the most quoted sentence about the German capital, the art critic Karl Scheffler’s acerbic aperçu is as true today as it was when ...

Prima la musica (‘first the music’) has always been the watchword of the conductor Sir Antonio Pappano; the words, and the ego, come second. Even so, throughout this carefully crafted memoir Pappano ...

Sitting among the packed congregation at last month’s memorial service for A S Byatt, I became aware that about thirty-­five years of professional life was passing rapidly in front of my eyes. In fact ...

Over the centuries, Alexandrians liked to describe their city using the Latin name Alexandria ad Aegyptum, meaning not ‘Alexandria in Egypt’ but ‘Alexandria on the way to Egypt’. As Islam Issa points ...