It is a courageous soul who would take on the challenge of writing a Life (even a partial Life) of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. The man lived a long time for his era, from 1646 to 1716. That is seventy ...

The hybrid is a strange concept. On the one hand it’s a commonplace, describing everything from cars to conferences. On the other hand, it is entangled with colonialism, where it has been used to ...

In early 1982 Ethiopia’s socialist military regime, the Derg, launched an offensive against Eritrean insurgents fighting for independence in what was then a northern province of Ethiopia. The Red Star ...

In 1841, Karl Marx got a doctorate for a dissertation about Hegel’s theory of the history of philosophy. He disagreed over details, but endorsed Hegel’s big idea: that every school of thought reveals ...

The publication in 1888 of the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío’s collection Azul changed the way the Spanish language was written. Darío became the representative poet of modernismo, a movement that ...

A novel about political awakening in free verse might not set every heart racing, but when the author is Mario Benedetti, one of Latin America’s best-loved poets, you know to expect humour, ...

J. G. Ballard once described Paul Pickering’s work as “truly subversive”. This would certainly be an apt description of his latest novel, in which he picks apart the morality of war and the creation ...

In 1916, Isaac Rosenberg wrote from the front line in France to his friend Edward Marsh that “The Homer for this war has yet to be found”. As Rosenberg knew, those in search of a Homer were looking ...

People and Trees is a pastoral set in Soviet Azerbaijan in the 1940s. If that sounds dull, then do not be deceived: Akram Aylisli’s novel is anything but. Aylisli, who recently turned eighty-seven, is ...

How Women Made Music, a collection of essays edited by the American journalist Alison Fensterstock, aims to help “women in music get their due”. The origins of the book trace back to NPR’s Turning the ...