Enlightenment
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
How French absolutism powered a techno-progressive revolution
The Enlightenment is back. Despite the best efforts of the past decade of handwringing about cultural imperialism and wailing over…
The thunderclap moment
For eight years I rented a small house in Oxford overlooking the canal. The landlord, a poet and novelist younger…
People’s galleries
Ignore the activists, says Tristram Hunt, Alexander von Humboldt’s Enlightenment project, embodied in a flash new Berlin museum, deserves celebrating
Islam’s Enlightenment
Muslim thinkers offer a remedy to fundamentalism
Paradis regained
Selina Mills on Maria Theresia von Paradis, the gifted but forgotten 18th-century composer, whose story will finally be told in a new chamber opera
Me time
‘You may think our modern world was born yesterday,’ said Simon Schama at the beginning of The Romantics and Us.…
The troubling history behind the healthy, happy smile
In his Physiognomische Fragmente, published between 1775 and 1778, the Swiss physiognomist Johann Kaspar Lavater insisted that ‘clean, white and…
Mozart magic
Centre stage, there’s an industrial-looking black platform, secured by cables. The Three Ladies snap the unconscious Tamino on a mobile…
Lessons from Utopia
Thomas More’s 1516 classic is a textbook for our troubled times, says William Cook
