It is the summer of 2019, and Sophie Evans, the reckless protagonist of Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett’s unsettling second novel, has arrived on an idyllic island in the Cyclades with her university friends Helena,... Read more »
In the Middle Ages, the lives of saints were the closest thing to bestsellers: stories copied, read aloud, and performed across Europe. They offered the faithful models of virtuous suffering, miraculous healing,... Read more »
Joseph Luzzi, a professor at Bard College in New York, is a Dante scholar whose books argue for the relevance of the great Italian art and literature of the late middle ages... Read more »
Ask Google’s AI video tool to create a film of a time-travelling doctor who flies around in a blue British phone booth and the result, unsurprisingly, resembles Doctor Who. And if you... Read more »
The complaint that cynics often make about modern art is that most of it looks as though it were made by children. (If your 10-year-old is pulling out crumpled Kandinskys from their... Read more »
According to Isaiah Berlin’s formulation, inspired by Archilochus’s aphorism that “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing,” one set of thinkers dig into a single topic all... Read more »
What if the protagonist of a novel was not a single person but a couple? Damian Barr takes on this challenge, and he’s found a historic couple who make the ideal source material.... Read more »
Some of us will go to an art gallery this weekend. Maybe it will help us reflect or inspire us. Isn’t that part of a life well lived? And if you don’t... Read more »
“The Secret Painter” here is Joe Tucker’s uncle Eric, apparently the most unaesthetic of men, inhabiting the most unaesthetic of places, the industrial town of Warrington, Lancashire. He kept his trousers up... Read more »