Eurofile

Why are we fascinated by talking horses and chatty cats in fiction?

The spectacle of this great host of well-meaning folk aroused in me yet more carping and cavilling

The word now used to denote enthusiasm has come a long way from its early days when it was most often used in connection with Christ

Photographic chronicles of the everyday, inspired by Nobel winner Annie Ernaux

The apocalypse comes to a group of siblings in south-east France in We Are Together Because, a stunning new novel by Kerry Andrew

The Italian revolutionised children’s education and established the schools that carry her name all over the world to this day

It arrived nearly 100 years ago to little fanfare but is close to becoming a national obsession. How did Britain fall so hard for pizza?

Our editor-at-large’s rundown of the pick of the week’s cinema, exhibitions and books

There was always something vulnerable about her, something half-said, the rest buried somewhere deep and inaccessible

Yotam Ottolenghi might be getting close to Jamie Oliver territory and that’s OK by me. He’s earned it

Tell your more pretentious friends you loved this nihilistic drama - but don’t bother watching it

In Italy, one famous Neapolitan pizzaiolo is daring to change the city’s view of putting pineapple on pizza

A new exhibition of Hetherington’s greatest photographs is not of guns and bombs – but of the men who use them

London Tide meanders along without knowing what it wants to say

Is crying such a bad thing? I’ve been doing a lot of it recently, for reasons regular readers will be aware of, and it never ceases to help

Whatever and wherever he played, his deep feeling for the music made the instrument seem like an extension of him

It sits on the border between Tibet and Nepal, but Everest is best known by its English name – given in honour of a Welsh geographer

His great contemporaries are gone, but the director is still shaking his fists – and miraculously, his films are getting even better

An exhibition of 150 objects found in the river opens at the Archaeological Crypt on Île de la Cité, Paris

Beethoven’s fascination with the Enlightenment eventually led him to adapt Schiller’s poem An die Freude (Ode to Joy) into his Ninth Symphony

To Liverpool, for lunch with a wonderful orator

Quo Vadis is fun but Rossellini's neorealism showed us Rome as it was

Our editor-at-large’s rundown of the pick of the week’s books, television and cinema

The Third Man turns 75

The new Enzo Mari exhibition at London’s Design Museum offers a rare glimpse at the artist's intentions

Casting decisions put the Bard at the centre of debate about Britishness

If I want to see the Alps nowadays, all I have to do is pick up my View-Master, point it in the direction of a light source, and begin depressing the lever

The Italian will be forever remembered for a wordless walk in a Viennese cemetery

Edvard Grieg may have been Norway’s greatest classical composer, but he actually inherited his name from his Scottish forebears

Thanks to a letter about delivery, The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula was finally attributed to its great master

Two generations ago, the chaos of Latin America inspired a wave of remarkable fiction. Now the patterns are repeating

The last-minute cancellation of the city’s intimate and unpretentious book festival Aye Write is an act of cultural vandalism