How Women Made Music, a collection of essays edited by the American journalist Alison Fensterstock, aims to help “women in music get their due”. The origins of the book trace back to NPR’s Turning the ...

Women’s voices from the ancient Roman world rarely survive. On her possibly third-century CE epitaph, “Veturia” is described as being married to a centurion when she was only ten or eleven, and dying ...

In 1841, Karl Marx got a doctorate for a dissertation about Hegel’s theory of the history of philosophy. He disagreed over details, but endorsed Hegel’s big idea: that every school of thought reveals ...

A novel about political awakening in free verse might not set every heart racing, but when the author is Mario Benedetti, one of Latin America’s best-loved poets, you know to expect humour, ...

The hybrid is a strange concept. On the one hand it’s a commonplace, describing everything from cars to conferences. On the other hand, it is entangled with colonialism, where it has been used to ...

The publication in 1888 of the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío’s collection Azul changed the way the Spanish language was written. Darío became the representative poet of modernismo, a movement that ...

Like many academics who write about philosophy or religion, I get a lot of emails from people keen to share their life stories, spiritual insights and cosmological theories. Now and then a handwritten ...

In June 1939 a San Francisco lawyer named Paul E. Madden pushed through an amendment to Californian state law that would turn out, decades later, to have life-or-death consequences across the nation.

In 1916, Isaac Rosenberg wrote from the front line in France to his friend Edward Marsh that “The Homer for this war has yet to be found”. As Rosenberg knew, those in search of a Homer were looking ...

J. G. Ballard once described Paul Pickering’s work as “truly subversive”. This would certainly be an apt description of his latest novel, in which he picks apart the morality of war and the creation ...

In early 1982 Ethiopia’s socialist military regime, the Derg, launched an offensive against Eritrean insurgents fighting for independence in what was then a northern province of Ethiopia. The Red Star ...