Convinced of her own brilliance, Gertrude Stein wished to be ‘as popular as Gilbert and Sullivan’ and laboured tirelessly to ensure that her celebrity would outlive her. @sophieolive examines the real ...

Looking at the triumphs and turpitude of the modern world, the temptation is always to seek someone responsible. In 1900, succumbing to that temptation, Mark Twain pointed to the 15th-century German ...

There are many idioms in Judaeo-Iraqi Arabic involving the heart. If you upset someone, they might say you’re chopping onions on their heart (yethrem basal all ras efadi), a term similar in meaning to ...

Twenty years ago I proposed to a publisher a book about parties in literature and history. I have always liked parties, largely because of their unscripted nature and air of imminent danger. Giving or ...

In 1843, two years before her death at the age of seventy-two, Cassandra Austen told her brother Charles that she had been ‘looking over & destroying some of my Papers’, but was keeping ‘a few letters ...

Hurrying up Lexington Avenue in unreliable spring weather, I’m struck by a momentary illusion that I’m in a 1950s horror film. The crowd milling around me – that distinctive New York mass of humanity ...

It’s not often that a biography really gets going after the author has reached the subject’s death. Gertrude Stein herself predicted that she would only be understood in the future: ‘For a very long ...

In the Book of Judges, the people of Gilead identify their Ephraimite enemies on the banks of the Jordan by demanding they say ‘shibboleth’, the Hebrew word for ‘stream’. If the captive says ...

What does it mean to be modern? The answer was largely determined rather early in the modern era by three thinkers who, as luck would have it, not only came from the same place and spoke the same ...

Convinced of her own brilliance, Gertrude Stein wished to be ‘as popular as Gilbert and Sullivan’ and laboured tirelessly to ensure that her celebrity would outlive her. @sophieolive examines the real ...

Richard Ellmann’s 1959 biography of James Joyce is a triumph. Regularly described as the greatest literary biography of the 20th century, it weaves together the threads of Joyce’s life and work in a ...

Peacetime conscription was, until recently, a feature of many European countries. But the practice is alien to Britain, where it existed for only a short period after the Second World War; the call-up ...