How the greatest novel ever written can help you love better Anna Karenina, despite its age, has much wisdom to impart to modern lovers, from the dangers of idealising a partner, to the pitfalls of Romanticism, the difficulty of marriage and the importance of communication. Naturally, there are elements of…

Bookshelves Can Fuel Prejudice. They Can Also Cure It. I just finished reading Virginia Woolf’s A Room Of One’s Own; an essay which incisively shows that women’s silence in fiction was down to their social marginalisation; they weren’t allowed the time, resources or the space with which to create masterpieces, and then were judged as creatively inferior on this…

A 5000-Year-Old Murder Mystery A Remarkable Discovery In 1991 two German tourists stumbled across a body emerging from glacial ice on the Öztal Alps in Southern Tyrol. The couple initially assumed the body to be relatively new; most likely that of a mountaineer who had slipped or succumbed to the elements. The couple alerted the authorities and…

Auguste Rodin once said that “Art is contemplation.” In his famous sculpture The Thinker, Rodin combined the two with powerful results. The statue is of a nude male, hunched on a stall, his elbows on his knees and head in hand, in the act of contemplation, something visible in every…

Men with arms that shoot bullets, a fornicating couple morphing into a crocodile, trees that uproot themselves and climb out of the ground and fish with broomsticks instead of tails. …

A timeless novel for anyone who has ever said “I don’t understand the new generation” ​​Turgenev’s widely acclaimed novel Fathers and Sons sought to portray the growing schism between the Liberals of the 1830–40's and the generation of young Nihilists which were appearing at the time of authorship. The Liberals…

“The line separating good and evil passes… right through every human heart.” — In The Gulag Archipelago, the Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn exposes the horrific crimes perpetrated by the Soviet State against its own citizens in the special labour camps, or Gulags, between 1918 and 1956. Part-documentary and part-autobiography, the book consists of legal documents, interviews with witnesses and autobiographical accounts of Solzhenitsyn’s…

Filling in the gaps of our emotional language One of the main appeals of reading for me is seeing others express feelings which for years have eluded me in writing. …

What do Picasso, Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein and Voltaire have in common? In his short book Think Like An Artist… and lead a More Creative, Productive Life, art correspondent Will Gompertz posits that artists steal. It sounds scandalous- as if The Sun has penned a grand expose- but in fact…