Siberia
The dangerous charm of Peter Matthiessen
The philandering author of the sublime The Snow Leopard spent a lifetime globe-hopping from the Amazonian jungle to the Siberian tundra at great cost to family life
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
The skull beneath the skin: Ghost Pains, by Jessi Jezewska Stevens, reviewed
Pain lurks below the surface of these sardonic short stories. Happiness is fleeting, and ‘we carry death within us like a stone within a fruit’, one narrator observes
An international civil war
Sara Wheeler describes the appalling brutality of the Russian Revolution and its far-reaching aftermath
Thoroughly hooked
Trying to catch fish with rod and line is a pursuit that, for many, goes far beyond the pleasant passing…
Rare beauty
The montane forests of far-eastern Russia have given rise to one of the finest nature books of recent years, The…
‘We are not cattle, we’re people’: everyday hell in Stalin’s labour camps
‘No testimony from this time must ever be forgotten,’ the great Lithuanian poet Tomas Venclova says in his afterword to…
Irish ayes
Luigi Cherubini is the pantomime villain of French romantic music. As head of the Paris Conservatoire in the 1820s he…
The icemen cometh
You wouldn’t want to stumble upon the Scythians. Armed with battle-axes, bows and daggers, and covered in fearsome tattoos, the…
Raiders of the lost Ark
Years ago, in an ill-conceived attempt to break into natural history radio, I borrowed a nearly dead car from a…
Gordon Bennett, what a disaster!
In the course of the 19th century, various flotillas of expeditions hastened to the polar regions in little wooden ships…
Tales of the Wild East
The brutality and folly of Russia’s bid to conquer America has the makings of grand tragicomedy says Sam Leith
