Speaking of her late husband, Valerie Eliot once remarked “He felt he had paid too much to be a poet, that he had suffered ...

Book titles that begin “The Treasury of …” suggest a box that you open to find jewels inside. The Treasury of Folklore: ...

Standing in the full / glare of the war, I’m a surface / reflecting its awesome light”, Oksana Maksymchuk declares in Still ...

An ambitious novel of ideas, Aurélien Bellanger’s Les derniers jours du Parti socialiste (The Last Days of the Socialist ...

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

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 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 ...

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 ...

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 ...