Belgium
Art deco gave veneer and frivolity a bad name
The jazz style was the blowsy filling between the noxious crusts of two world wars. More than 30 years passed…
Fight or flight?: 33 Place Brugmann, by Alice Austen, reviewed
Residents of a sedate apartment block in Brussels react in very different ways to the Nazi invasion of Belgium in 1940
Nazis, killer dogs and weird sex: Empty Wigs, by Jonathan Meades, reviewed
Meades’s 1,000-page doorstopper is also vast in scope, containing 19 overlapping stories of a family scattered through time and space, and their role in a variety of nefarious goings-on
The prescient politics of Tintin
Georges Remi, better known as Hergé, the creator of Tintin, was a failed journalist. His first job after leaving school…
The good soldier Maczek – a war hero betrayed
After fighting for the Allies in Hungary, France, Belgium and Holland, Stanislaw Maczek finds himself stripped of his Polish citizenship as a result of the Yalta conference
‘Now I have been made whole’: Lucy Sante’s experience of transition
Until the age of 66, Sante lived as a deeply divided man. In this story of self-realisation, she describes how transitioning finally ‘lifted the veil’ over her existence
Europe gripped by a fifth wave
How quickly things change. Just a month ago many EU countries were being praised for keeping some Covid restrictions in…
The manhunt dividing Belgium
Belgium’s leading virologist is in hiding, holed up with his family in a government safe house. The reason? A right-wing…
It’s grim up north
The strange and faintly sinister works of the Belgian artist Léon Spilliaert have been compared — not unreasonably — to…
Hollande equals Thatcher? Not quite, Monsieur le President, but keep trying
Have you ever tried discussing the merits of gun control with a Texan, or of deregulated labour markets with a…
A stunning blend of simplicity and complexity
Reading Tintin when I was a child, in Britain in the 1970s, I always assumed Georges Remi’s creation was just…
Death watch
If you don’t think legalising ‘assisted dying’ is a slippery slope, you haven’t been paying attention
Flanders
Usually, one of the first indications that you’ve entered a bilingual country is that the road signs are in two…
Antwerp
Napoleon didn’t think much of Antwerp. ‘Scarcely a European city at all,’ he scoffed. If only he could see it…
Deep in the heart of darkness
For decades, all the outside world knew was that Patrice Lumumba, the Congolese independence leader, had been done away with.…
Eurocrash and Eurotrash
Funny how things turn upside-down with time. A work of contemporary dance that made an iconoclastic splash decades ago is…
Christ of the coal mines
William Cook reports from the sooty netherworld that made an artist of Vincent Van Gogh
Ebola shakes
By some quirk of fate, just as news reached the papers that the Scottish nurse who had contracted Ebola while…
Cellulite factor
Are Rubens’s figures too fat for the British to appreciate them? Martin Gayford investigates
Napoleon’s last victory
If you visit Waterloo today, there’s no question which general comes out on top
Belgian fancy
In 1958 a vast international trade fair was held just outside Brussels. As well as being a showcase for industry,…
