The word “vampire” first appears in English in sensational accounts of a revenant panic in Serbia in the early 18th century. One case in 1725 concerned a recently deceased peasant farmer, Peter... 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 »
Naomi Alderman argues that one of the most useful things to know is the name of the era you’re living in, and she proposes one for ours: the Information Crisis. In fact,... Read more »
We live in a hyper-political yet curiously unrevolutionary age, one of hashtags rather than barricades. Perhaps that’s why so many writers this year have looked wistfully back to a time when strongly... Read more »
At a moment when the world is desperate to comprehend Russia, journalist Julia Ioffe seeks to explain it through the eyes of women, some of them historical figures, some from her own family. The... Read more »
Domination by Alice Roberts review – a brilliant but cynical history of Christianity | History books
Domination tells the story of how a tiny local cult became one of the greatest cultural and political forces in history. Alice Roberts puts the case that the Roman empire lived on in... Read more »
Stupidity, no question, can be just as rich and subtle as its opposite. Three and a half decades on, I still sometimes meditate on what a school friend of mine said in a... Read more »
Some years ago, a colleague on the Irish Times took the columnist Nuala O’Faolain to lunch. Nuala was famous, and feared, as a controversialist who specialised in attacking popular pieties, unless it was the... Read more »
I Have Avenged America: Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Haiti’s Fight for Freedom is a new biography by Professor Julia Gaffield of William & Mary. The book sheds light on the life and legacy of... Read more »