Veroniki Dalakoura (b.1952) first came to the notice of her translator, John Taylor, after their mutual friend Elias Petropoulos alerted him to her work. It is easy to see how Petropoulos, bard of the ...

The Egyptian poet Joyce Mansour was a leading member of the surrealist group around André Breton. An exile living in Paris, she often made a myth of her life. “I was born in 1928”, she once declared, ...

When asked which historical female figure he would most like to dine with, Umberto Eco named the renowned medieval beauty Uta von Naumburg “above all others”. The same impulse appears to have been ...

Angela Merkel was the first and last East German to lead a united Germany, Europe’s central power. There may be future chancellors who come from the lands that were once the German Democratic Republic ...

Welcome to Darkenbloom, a town in Austria’s easternmost and least attractive province, on the border with Hungary. A town whose castle burnt down in 1946, whose count fled and whose tourist offerings ...

Bernard Cerquiglini is a former director of the Institut national de la langue française, and the first part of his catchy title quotes the former French prime minister Georges Clemenceau, who was ...

In the town, no one has a shadow. That is because the people have their shadows stripped at birth, or else leave them at the impenetrable twenty-six-foot-high wall that surrounds the town, guarded by ...

The Weimar Republic, founded after the revolution that overthrew the Kaiser in 1918 and destroyed fifteen years later by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, still seems to many to offer the paradigm for ...

“Manchester is the south of the north”, writes Jeanette Winterson: spot-on. I’ve never met anyone who has a clear mental map of the place. On the ground it seems to have a grid pattern, but the roads ...

In Brussels, the Baudouin Tower sits on a corner in the business district. The building is heavy, boxy, boring, of a piece with the many piles of glass and steel in the neighbourhood. Yet inside this ...

Some novels, particularly those of a supernatural or fantastical bent, can read like working notes for their fullest iteration as a movie. By contrast, Andrew Michael Hurley’s grisliest jolts are best ...