“Oh, I thought you were a man!” were the words uttered by the pioneering nuclear physicist Ernest Rutherford when he first met Lise Meitner, the scientist who would go on to discover nuclear fission.

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Central Europe has seldom been short of dissidents. Their names are celebrated in its crowded pantheons of national heroes: defenders of religious freedom, peasant tribunes, revolutionary Jacobins, ...

Authorship is a singular business, or is usually thought to be so. We reckon that there are practical justifications for writers’ supposed preference for working alone – although there are also some ...

and walk the city with multimillioned windows for eyes. Versions of the world and time are limned through screens over-pinging with messages. cats curled under fenceposts, the lampposts’ travelogues ...

It is December 25, 1975. Maria Gabriela Llansol writes in her diary of meditation, chickens, her dog, of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Daybreak and the journal kept by the religious historian Mircea Eliade, ...

Library renewals The heroic story of the men who saved thousands of manuscripts from being destroyed by al-Qaeda ...

Saudi Arabia has flourishing folkloric dances, known as ardha, made popular by monarchs who have regularly staged them to welcome foreign leaders including George W. Bush, Donald Trump and members of ...

In 1942 the real estate magnate and philanthropist Alfred Knight purchased a copy of Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles in its second, expanded edition (1587). He was building a collection of rare books ...

Susannah Gibson’s new book is a biographical history of the women who formed and hosted some of the most famous London salons in the eighteenth century. Following work on this subject by Norma Clarke, ...

The expression “Don’t get me wrong” is a good place to start – an ethical mandate as well as a critic’s dictum. In its efforts to enforce informality while insisting on the possibility of estrangement ...

When the prospect of an edition of Ted Hughes’s letters arose, Seamus Heaney wrote to Carol, Hughes’s widow, with some advice. “A hefty volume done with ...