Musical mountain obscured by cloud
Two centuries on, Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata is still as enigmatic and sublime as ever
Politics, Ideas and the Arts
Lusting after ruins: Rodin and the art of ancient Greece
For much of his life, Auguste Rodin suffered from an undiagnosed complaint: an ailment the Germans call Ruinenlust
A dark universe of the imagination
The Darker the Night, The Brighter the Stars is a wonderful, strange, genre-defying book
A sufi sage for the ages
Ibn Khaldun has been repackaged to serve contemporary concerns many times, but Robert Irwin's biography cuts through the myth-making
Exodus the world ignored
Lyn Julius's Uprooted is an authoritative history of the decline and virtual end of Jewish life in the Arab world
Putin’s playthings
Nato's response to the Skripal poisoning has revealed its disunity
Penny foolish
The 1p piece is useless, but it is less than half a century since it was bright and new
Dürer’s diversion
A Milan exhibition shows how much Dürer was influenced by the Italian masters
Unsafe space
How can students win the battle for free speech on campus?
Cyril Ramaphosa’s poisoned chalice
South Africa's new leader has a near-impossible task ahead of him
Presidents for life Putin and Xi menace the West
A former diplomat and politician during the Cold War asks whether the threats posed by Russia and China are now more ominous than ever
Nation states could save the Middle East
For decades the West has backed the wrong models of reform for the turbulent region. Donald Trump’s vision offers a glimmer of hope