Hungary’s Tolstoy
Miklós Bánffy's Transylvanian Trilogy is full of exceptional richness, character and colour
Politics, Ideas and the Arts
Masterpiece — or male and stale?
Once venerated as the founders of Western art, the Old Masters are losing their allure
How the Ancients can help the Moderns
Against all the odds, the study of Classics is increasing in popularity — and for very good reasons
How baffling to know Mr Lear
In her biography of Edward Lear, Sara Lodge engages with the contradictions at the heart of a man determined to both express and conceal himself
The spy who loved us
"The Spy and the Traitor brings out with agonising clarity the danger that Oleg Gordievsky had voluntarily decided to run"
Exiles fall out in La La Land
How Thomas Mann and Arnold Schoenberg quarreled in the irritable hothouse climate of the Los Angeles émigrés
To whom does Kafka belong?
In telling the story of Kafka's papers, Benjamin Balint’s new book explores a larger issue: who owns Kafka?
No art too good for the workers
Fernand Léger drew from popular entertainment and working life to make Cubism less inaccessible
Viennese rooms with a point of view
The salons of Vienna were key spaces for promoting the emancipation of women and Jews
Sylvia has the last wounding word
The second volume of Plath’s Letters begins with great happiness and poetic promise — and ends with the destruction of her marriage and her death
Low points of life with Father
This has been an extraordinary autumn for books about the havoc bad fathers wreak on their children. It is hard to know which father comes out worst: Jonathan Miller or Steve Jobs
A journey towards faith
A novel set during the Algerian war has chilling relevance to what is happening in the Middle East today