Charlie Connelly
04 October 2023
Joseph Pilates: The acrobat who taught the world to keep fit
Internment provided the German the perfect conditions to develop the exercise regimes that would make his name famous
Read the full article04 October 2023
Britain’s Grimm reapers
European fairy tales arrived on our shores 200 years ago – but the major part played by two London lawyers is all but forgotten
Read the full article27 September 2023
André Breton: The architect of surrealism
For all his unorthodox methods and opinions, Breton never lost a desire to create and foster an entirely new mentality
Read the full article27 September 2023
A Viennese escape to victory
It gave the world Freud and a host of cultural figures. But as a new book celebrates Austria’s capital, what about its footballers?
Read the full article20 September 2023
Millie Bobby Brown is haunted by her own ghostwriter
Actor Millie Bobby Brown used a co-writer on a novel telling a family story. What’s so wrong with that?
Read the full article20 September 2023
Adelina Patti: The Italian Bel Canto Soprano who was in a league of her own
Patti soared to fame pre-radio and pre-gramophone, making her stardom all the more impressive
Read the full article13 September 2023
Folke Bernadotte: The even-handed Swedish diplomat who saw the bigger picture
During the second world war, the nobleman negotiated the release of tens of thousands of prisoners from German concentration camps
Read the full article13 September 2023
The little local library that made me a borrower
Almost 800 public libraries have shut their doors since the Conservatives came to power. That is 800 too many
Read the full article06 September 2023
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec: Paris’s most valuable and committed chronicler
Toulouse-Lautrec was an aristocrat who recognised in the outliers of society a shared vulnerable otherness
Read the full article06 September 2023
Arthur Rimbaud, the poet of sacred disorder
As Rimbaud’s masterpiece A Season In Hell turns 150, reappraising the short life and wild times of a talented, toxic “damned soul”
Read the full article30 August 2023
Olga Baclanova: The Russian who conquered America
Eclipsed by contemporaries like Garbo and Dietrich, it’s difficult today to appreciate just what a presence Baclanova was in her heyday
Read the full article30 August 2023
The depths of obsession on le Métro
Full of intriguing quirks and anecdotes, Andrew Martin’s Metropolitain is nothing short of a love letter to a subterranean railway
Read the full article23 August 2023
Mireille Darc: A remarkable life built from cruel beginnings
Through hard work and determination the actress forged an exalted presence in the French screen canon
Read the full article23 August 2023
The voices found in translation
For the author Maylis de Kerangal, reading one of her books in another language is like hearing a familiar tune on a new instrument
Read the full article16 August 2023
Rio Reiser: The rock star who was never at home anywhere
To the end, the German remained convinced that revolution was in the best interests of the people
Read the full article16 August 2023
The telling story of a liar’s life
Italian writer Veronica Raimo’s remarkable Lost On Me is yet another example of why we need more translated European fiction
Read the full article02 August 2023
The best books for your great summer escape
From the ancient Mediterranean through 1960s Ireland to modern-day Appalachia, reads that will transport you
Read the full article02 August 2023
Joseph Conrad: The writer who could have been born frowning
Few writers have been able to distil the world’s most complex themes and turn them into absorbing fiction as well as Conrad
Read the full article26 July 2023
Ingmar Bergman: The director with a legacy almost unparalleled in the history of cinema
Few directors have mined their internal anguish and lived experience as deeply as Bergman
Read the full article26 July 2023
Carel Fabritius’s Dutch art of silence
A new book rediscovers the power and subtlety of Carel Fabritius, the forgotten master of the Dutch golden age
Read the full article19 July 2023
Milan Kundera and the genius of a perpetual outsider
No-one else wrote like the Czech author, a man who rejected our ‘foolish certainties’ and defined the European novel for the modern age
Read the full article19 July 2023
Carmen Martín Gaite: A proper, old-fashioned woman of letters
Whatever her outlet, the Spanish writer always derived immense pleasure from reactions to her work and never lost her gratitude
Read the full article12 July 2023
Anastasia Nikolaevna: One of history’s most tragic enigmas
Born into privilege she may have been, but Anastasia’s short life and awful death remain one of the great tragedies of the 20th century
Read the full article12 July 2023
The art of the everyday: the books viewing the world more gently
A new strain of writing, that engages with the mundane things of life, is more profound than it may first appear
Read the full article05 July 2023
Revealing the stories of the unheard in Europe
Ben Judah’s superb This Is Europe is a tour through the continent’s underbelly, giving voice to the exploited and marginalised
Read the full article05 July 2023
Herman Brood: The addict with a purpose
Sold as the most exciting thing to come out of Europe since the Sex Pistols, his hedonistic lifestyle halted his momentum
Read the full article21 June 2023
Ana María Matute: The voice of Spain’s dazed generation
For all life threw at her, the writer never lost the last sliver of an innocence battered irreparably by events outside her control
Read the full article21 June 2023
Characters in search of an author
An obsession with what the likes of Pulp Fiction’s Vincent Vega and Succession’s Shiv Roy read on screen
Read the full article14 June 2023
Bert Kaempfert: The record producer who gave the Beatles their first contract
With his “music that doesn't disturb” the German became one of the biggest-selling recording artists in Europe
Read the full article14 June 2023
Untold stories from working-class rural Britain
Too many books about the countryside are over-written and nostalgic. But Rebecca Smith’s brilliant new memoir gets it just right
Read the full article07 June 2023
When MPs go under the covers
Cleo Watson’s debut novel, Whips, is the latest in a long line of raunchy romps set in the world’s least erotic place – Westminster
Read the full article07 June 2023
Pierre Loti: The unlikely chronicler of the exotic
The overriding atmosphere of Loti’s output is one of a lost innocence, a yearning nostalgia for a world before the corrupting influence of Europe
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