Arts and Culture

Venice has produced few major writers – yet few places have inspired so many authors

Karl May's Winnetou and the German soul are inseparable. I'm optimistic the country's icon will evade cancellation

The best children’s shows manage to entertain both the children and their parents, but this production tries too obviously to get both on side and satisfies neither

Following the attempted murder of Salman Rushdie the term chautauqua may well undergo a semantic shift, becoming synonymous not with the exercise of free speech, but with crazed attempts to repress it

City skylines of tower blocks, motorway networks, urban plazas - everywhere you look today there are traces of the Swiss-French architect

Many popular musical terms have their origins in West African languages – but ‘riff’ probably isn’t one of them

However you might choose to prepare broad beans, using the vegetable in a tortilla is an excellent way to go

The first of a new series on the hidden aspects of well-known cities explores the suburb of Catalonia’s capital that stays blissfully tourist-free

Authors and readers love live events. But will they survive the attack on Salman Rushdie?

After so many false starts, will this be the season Paris Saint-Germain finally attain their Holy Grail of the Champions League?

In 1992, Wales' most incendiary political rock band took to the stage of the Reading Festival for the first time

German public broadcasting has gone beyond a public service and has become excessive and expensive

As a new collection in Vienna shows, the rich have stopped lending art to public galleries, and are opening their own spaces instead

A film about the female conductor of a major German orchestra is set to light up the awards season this year. Unfortunately, it's fiction

This list puts an emphasis on the perfectly formed pop single

A Spanish drama about the aftermath of a brutal gang rape is a little hard to take seriously

The National needs to be braver in its productions, but until then this is an amusing enough divertissement

An exhibition of Frank Brangwyn’s work at Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft is full of colour and life – like the artist himself

In fetishising the trainer, the devotee makes of it a transitional object: something that eases the troubling developmental stage between childhood and adulthood

Individually their fates were an immeasurable tragedy for two families, together they were a cause

A 17th-century encounter between the peoples of Newfoundland and incoming Europeans had a tragic end

Duck isn't easy to cook, but it is a bird of which we have plenty, and which is ideal when considering autumn eating

The Dutchman is just the latest Manchester United manager to struggle to shake off the ghost of Alex Ferguson

Heath Robinson’s cartoons of elaborate contraptions provided cheer during the world wars, as a new exhibition of his work illustrates

A film that has won plaudits abroad has been unofficially blacklisted in Georgia, where it was made. Its silence speaks volumes about the country’s democratic decline

Ten days before Hitler’s suicide, Felix Hartlaub disappeared. But his notebooks live on

When Weller and co went all French on us

If he'd only made Das Boot, a place in the movie pantheon would still be his. But there was so much more to the man who became the ideal studio director

A new Polish crime thriller is riveting - but also stressful, banal and not a great deal of fun to watch

Almost all big productions at the National seem to sell out sight unseen these days, but how long will this continue if they keep turning out big, unfunny flops like this?

The Mail has reviewed Bloody Difficult Women, but another newspaper continues to refuse

Its creators may plead otherwise, but the world's biggest TV show rendered sex as grotesque and alienating as any puritanical religiosity