The publication in 1888 of the Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío’s collection Azul changed the way the Spanish language was written ...

It is a courageous soul who would take on the challenge of writing a Life (even a partial Life) of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. The man lived a long time for his era, from 1646 to 1716. That is seventy ...

A novel about political awakening in free verse might not set every heart racing, but when the author is Mario Benedetti, one of Latin America’s best-loved poets, you know to expect humour, ...

People and Trees is a pastoral set in Soviet Azerbaijan in the 1940s. If that sounds dull, then do not be deceived: Akram Aylisli’s novel is anything but. Aylisli, who recently turned eighty-seven, is ...

How Women Made Music, a collection of essays edited by the American journalist Alison Fensterstock, aims to help “women in music get their due”. The origins of the book trace back to NPR’s Turning the ...

What makes a battle great? One quality patently lacking in the case of Leuthen was “decisiveness”. Although it ended, on December 5, 1757, in a resounding victory for the Prussians, commanded in ...

Women’s voices from the ancient Roman world rarely survive. On her possibly third-century CE epitaph, “Veturia” is described as being married to a centurion when she was only ten or eleven, and dying ...

Peter Gizzi’s Fierce Elegy, which this week won the T. S. Eliot prize, is prefaced with nearly two full pages of unbridled encomia from the likes of Ocean Vuong, Rae Armantrout and Alice Notley.

In 1841, Karl Marx got a doctorate for a dissertation about Hegel’s theory of the history of philosophy. He disagreed over details, but endorsed Hegel’s big idea: that every school of thought reveals ...

In June 1939 a San Francisco lawyer named Paul E. Madden pushed through an amendment to Californian state law that would turn out, decades later, to have life-or-death consequences across the nation.