Boom time for Picasso Inc.
One name dominates the art market, with his paintings soaring in value and remaining a solid investment
Politics, Ideas and the Arts
Rulers ruled by a sense of history
"Christopher Clark's subject is neither time nor power, but something even more evanescent: how those who wielded power were influenced by their sense of history"
Still waiting in the wings
The Fourth Reich concerns of the first 15 years or so after the war were essentially rational, but in the 1960s the term became “universalised”, exaggerated, and distorted
The man who went off script
In her lively and readable biography, Adina Hoffman charts Ben Hecht’s progress from America’s most successful screenwriter to Jewish activist
The naked and the dead, Nevada-style
"The first unusual characteristic was that Hof was a self-described pimp, the owner of several brothels in rural Nevada. The second was that, by the time election day came around, Hof was
The iPhone, not the I Ching
"What exactly is China anyway? Is it a civilisation, as some claim? Or a “civilisation state”, with unique cultural markers but within set borders?"
Illiberal and irrelevant
"Francis Green and David Kynaston do not like private schools. They think the government should do something to stop children attending them. Why? You already know the answer."
Flying high
Peter Stanford grew up with a benevolent notion of angels. But the true picture is complicated: while some angels in the Bible are kindly, others are brutal
Daddy, I hardly knew you
Linn Ullmann's novel Unquiet interweaves her childhood with conversations with her father Ingmar Bergman — a work of both memory and imagination
The art of survival in Nazi Germany
Artists in the Third Reich swiftly learnt to adapt to Hitler’s traditionalist cultural diktats
Mapuche thugs fan the flames of revenge
"On one side is a government with a history of military overreach and ethnic cleansing. On the other is Chile’s poorest and most disenfranchised group rising up after centuries of mistreatment"
Foie Gove
Michael Gove's plan to ban foie gras is an essentially frivolous self-advertisement