Charlie Connelly
05 June 2024
The composer who forged his own path
Ligeti’s rigorous antipathy to ideology was maintained throughout his life and extended way beyond his music
Read the full article05 June 2024
Ian Penman’s portrait of a dead man
A new book tells the story of a German film-maker who tried to break with the country’s past
Read the full article29 May 2024
The Apostle of the guitar
Before Segovia, the guitar was not an instrument to be taken seriously. In a matter of minutes, everything changed
Read the full article29 May 2024
A writer on the wall
Born an East Berliner, Jenny Erpenbeck has won the International Booker for her sensitive insight on life behind and beyond borders
Read the full article22 May 2024
Following in Fyodor’s footsteps
A dreamlike lost masterpiece about a writer’s fixation with Dostoevsky – a man who would have hated him
Read the full article22 May 2024
The racing driver who tried to hold fate at bay
Four days after surviving a huge crash, his love of being behind the wheel was too strong to resist
Read the full article15 May 2024
Cricket in the blood
A new book charts the surprising passion in Ukraine for cricket, the country’s fastest-growing sport – until the Russians invaded
Read the full article15 May 2024
The pioneer in art-as-spectacle
Whether she had an actual gun in her hand or not, art became her weapon, a noisy defence against the world and an instrument of her reckoning with the past
Read the full article08 May 2024
Erich von Stroheim, a great European life
He arrived in America pretending to be the son of an Austrian count but became one of early cinema’s most adventurous and meticulous directors
Read the full article08 May 2024
Fall of the rare book thieves
The recent bust by Europol of an international ring of thieves targeting rare Russian editions has shocked the classic book world
Read the full article01 May 2024
The family at the end of the world
The apocalypse comes to a group of siblings in south-east France in We Are Together Because, a stunning new novel by Kerry Andrew
Read the full article01 May 2024
Maria Montessori: The woman who created the miracle of San Lorenzo
The Italian revolutionised children’s education and established the schools that carry her name all over the world to this day
Read the full article24 April 2024
Mstislav Rostropovich: The cellist who soundtracked the fall of the Wall
Whatever and wherever he played, his deep feeling for the music made the instrument seem like an extension of him
Read the full article24 April 2024
Beautiful spark of divinity
Beethoven’s fascination with the Enlightenment eventually led him to adapt Schiller’s poem An die Freude (Ode to Joy) into his Ninth Symphony
Read the full article17 April 2024
Alida Valli: The actress who turned a walk into a victory parade
The Italian will be forever remembered for a wordless walk in a Viennese cemetery
Read the full article17 April 2024
The lost stories of Glasgow
The last-minute cancellation of the city’s intimate and unpretentious book festival Aye Write is an act of cultural vandalism
Read the full article10 April 2024
Roland Topor: The polymath who made a career out of the grotesque
A dream provided an epitaph inadvertently appropriate for a man who spent his life producing art and literature that shocked and appalled the unsuspecting
Read the full article10 April 2024
Andrej Nikolaidis and the wild flame of hatred
The Montenegrin has been the subject of a mock trial and effigy-burning over his latest novel, Anomaly
Read the full article03 April 2024
Suzanne Valadon: The eccentric artist who gave her name to an asteroid
Even for all her success and the wealth that came with it, Valadon’s bohemianism remained undiminished
Read the full article03 April 2024
No woman is an island
Ireland is going through a golden literary age – but Sinéad Gleeson’s extraordinary debut stands out from the rest
Read the full article20 March 2024
Claude Debussy: The composer who captured the rhythms of the sea
Finesse, sensuality and richness are what Debussy brought to a staid musical world unprepared for such an emphatic upending of form and technique
Read the full article20 March 2024
The birth of the bookshop
How an 18th-century Somerset cobbler’s obsessive love of reading shaped the world of bookselling as we know it
Read the full article13 March 2024
Willem de Kooning: The unintentional painter
To the Dutchman commercial art was just as fulfilling as something more purely creative – and it came with a wage
Read the full article13 March 2024
The hardest truths: Clara Dupont-Monod and the weight of the past
In a new book by a best-selling French author, ancient onlookers watch a family come to terms with a disabled child
Read the full article06 March 2024
Mikhail Bulgakov: The USSR’s most deliberate provocateur
A barely concealed desire for the old Russian empire would infuse his work but even this did not preclude Stalin’s tacit admiration
Read the full article06 March 2024
The lady vanishes: the mystery of H Ellen Browning
A great writer travelled to Hungary, wrote a single book, and then disappeared. All she left behind was a masterpiece
Read the full article28 February 2024
Horst Buchholz: The man who made Germans cool again
He arrived in the US as the “James Dean of Germany” but that promise would never truly be fulfilled
Read the full article28 February 2024
Seamus Heaney’s songs of the earth
How a Danish archaeologist’s book about ancient bodies found buried in peat bogs inspired some of the poet’s greatest work
Read the full article21 February 2024
Stefan Zweig: The perpetual exile longing for the Viennese life he once knew
Many exiled European writers embraced their situation, but for Zweig the loss of his nation represented the loss of his identity
Read the full article21 February 2024
Esther Rutter: Her hopes rose in Grasmere
How a young woman finally unlocked the life ahead of her by spending a year at Wordsworth’s cottage in the Lake District
Read the full article14 February 2024
Kralle Krawinkel: The guitarist who put the Dada into Da Da Da
As good a musician as Keith Richards, the German was never entirely comfortable in the limelight
Read the full article14 February 2024
A family on the edge of the world
No other writer has captured the singular beauty of the northern French coast like Rebecca Gisler in her debut novel
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