Tuscan escapades: Villa Coco, by Andrew Sean Greer, reviewed
An American archivist, hired to catalogue an elderly baronessa’s antiques, finds himself drawn into increasingly absurd adventures in the Italian countryside
The furious tug of war between 18th-century Whigs and Tories
George Owers evokes the seismic cultural divisions between the parties – with different coffee houses attended, wines drunk, doctors consulted and fashions preferred
It’s a wonder that the Parthenon remains standing at all
From a temple to Athena, it became a Byzantine, then Latin, church, a mosque, a powder magazine and finally a ruin. Lord Elgin’s vandalism was hardly anything new
Why are we obsessed with Japanese fiction?
Imagine you come across a small café in a back alley of Tokyo where you can travel back in time…
Alexander Pushkin – Russia’s greatest letter-writer
Intimate, earthy and uninhibited, Pushkin’s letters, collected together, read like a novel and give an encyclopaedic view of 19th-century Russian life
