Lead book review
Charles Darwin’s contribution to Patagonia’s grim history
Characterising native tribes as ‘naked, painted, shivering, hideous savages’ proved no less calamitous for their survival as Argentina’s efforts to exterminate them, says Matthew Carr
‘I secreted a venom which spurted out indiscriminately’ – Muriel Spark
Frances Wilson’s mesmerising biography of one of the past century’s most singular writers is especially enlightening on the ‘domestic savagery’ often required of a great artist
The mystifying cult status of Gertrude Stein
The American author (of mostly unreadable books) was revered in 1920s Paris and became an international celebrity – though no one was quite sure why
Why shamanism shouldn’t be dismissed as superstitious savagery
Our need for belief in the supernatural gave rise to a demand for ‘mystical intermediaries’, or shamans, forging man’s earliest religion from which all others developed, argues Manvir Singh
Studying Dickens at university was once considered demeaning. Now it’s too demanding
Accessible, ‘relevant’ short stories are increasingly replacing the classics, as the monuments of Victorian literature defeat today’s undergraduates
The love that conquered every barrier – including the Iron Curtain
Iain Pears tells the dramatic story of how two art historians – one English, one Russian – met by chance in Venice and found they couldn’t live without each other
Time is running out for the world’s great rivers
Overfishing, industrial pollution and dams are squeezing life from once revered waterways that have sustained civilisations for centuries
The making of Van Gogh as an artist came at a terrible cost
In the manic years 1886-88 when he lived with his brother in Paris, Vincent worked at fever-pitch, exhausting himself and Theo and driving them both towards insanity
William Blake still weaves his mystic spell
Philip Hoare considers the ageless, hypnotic appeal of the painter, poet, visionary and ‘one-man utopia’
Poor little rich girl: the extraordinary life of Yoko Ono
Her background was one of privilege and she married one of the most famous men of our time but the Japanese artist suffered her fair share of grief and misfortune
How Anne Frank’s photograph became as recognisable as the Mona Lisa
To date, the diary, pieced together from Anne’s notebooks, has sold more than 30 million copies worldwide, with her story further explored in plays, films and novels
The dogged women on the trail of Dr Crippen
Had it not been for the persistence of Mrs Crippen’s friends at the Ladies’ Music Hall Guild, the notorious murderer might have escaped scot free
The Bloomsbury Group’s precarious paradise
The latest biography of Vanessa Bell explores her domestic and artistic radicalism but avoids the central contradiction of her life: deceiving her daughter Angelica for years over her parentage
A war of words: circulating forbidden literature behind the Iron Curtain
For decades, the CIA smuggled works by George Orwell, Hannah Arendt, Czeslaw Milosz and many others into the Soviet bloc in a battle for hearts, minds and intellects
The enlightened rule of the Empress Maria Theresa
‘She hates to see anyone put to death’, said one contemporary of the monarch who abolished torture and serfdom and pioneered the practice of open weekly audiences with the public
The supreme conjuror Charles Dickens weaves his magic spell
Peter Conrad reminds us how the skilled stage performer, always yearning for enchantment, even introduced a few disguised magic tricks into his fiction
In search of Pico della Mirandola, the quintessential Renaissance Man
Though the scholar himself remains an enigma, his theories about language as a portal to the divine are explored in depth by Edward Wilson-Lee
The pointlessness of the German Peasants’ War – except in Marxist ideology
The short-lived 16th-century revolt resolved absolutely nothing, but it loomed large in Engels’s thought and in the official DDR interpretation of history
The international criminal justice system was prejudiced from the start
Double standards have existed since its foundation in 1945, with the most powerful nations determining who should be held accountable for war crimes
For all its fame, the Great Siege of Malta made no difference to the course of history
The victorious Hospitallers soon subsided into genteel irrelevance, while the Ottomans remained a formidable Mediterranean power for centuries to come
Red-letter days for Gilbert & George
After a successful show in Moscow in 1990, the odd couple went on to even greater triumph in China three years later, as the long-suffering curator of both exhibitions describes
Once upon a time in Germany: the Grimms’ legacy of revenge and gory redemption
The Household Tales only attained their standing after the brothers’ death, with the unification of Germany and the decades of nationalism that led to catastrophe
Emilie du Châtelet – a lone voice among Enlightenment thinkers
The brilliant physicist’s warning to her contemporaries not to carry respect for great men to the point of idolatry fell on deaf ears
Celebrating Miss Marple, expert on the wickedness of village life
The elderly spinster with a fine sense of evil was a creation Agatha Christie never tired of – unlike the ‘tiresome, egocentric’ Hercule Poirot
The mythic mishmash of Wagner’s Ring
Its towering themes of gods, giants, dragons and magic were not purely Germanic in origin, whatever fever-dream they later conjured in Hitler’s brain
