Italian Insouciance
The over-generous Italian welfare state means that for all the belt-tightening, most people in the country still enjoy la dolce vita
Gift for Greece
Spirit of London 2012? The best thing that could happen to the Olympic Games would be to send them home
Out of the Fire
Was Jean Sibelius's newly discovered Eighth Symphony destroyed in one of the composer's notorious drunken rages?
Survivor of Stasiland
The death of Christa Wolf has left Germany bereft of a powerful bridge of literary consciousness, whose universal work could talk to a once-divided
Powell’s Penpal
A new limited-edition paperback documents the charming correspondence between US book collector Robert Vanderbilt and Anthony Powell
Fussball über alles
The German film Der Ganz Grosse Traum shows the delightful story of the first Anglo-German conflict (football match, that is)
Matthew Carr
After leaving art school, Matthew specialised in drawing nudes, executing compelling life-size studies of young contemporaries. When he subsequently confined himself to carrying out
The Tartar Terminator
The unheralded Kazakh Rashid Nezhmetdinov was universally admired by his peers for his astonishing attacking ferocity