Boris Dralyuk on a compelling portrait of the Black Sea port of Odesa, past and present; Russell Williams is put in mind of the rumpled TV detective Columbo by a pacy French novel Vanessa Curtis is ...

Over the past thirty years, English football has undergone a complete transformation. In 1992, twenty-two clubs broke away from the Football League to create a new entity, the Premier League. It has ...

Today Albert Einstein is, literally speaking, nowhere. Almost all of him (setting aside the unfortunate story of his purloined brain) was cremated and the ashes were distributed on the waters of the ...

Speaking of her late husband, Valerie Eliot once remarked “He felt he had paid too much to be a poet, that he had suffered too much”. Given how little of the poet’s time was spent actually producing ...

Occupied Words is a study of how the Yiddish language was reforged in the crucible of the Holocaust. Hannah Pollin-Galay’s book is divided into three sections. The first concerns the various lexica of ...

Book titles that begin “The Treasury of …” suggest a box that you open to find jewels inside. The Treasury of Folklore: Waterlands, wooded worlds and starry skies looks and feels like a heavy box, its ...

“Standing in the full / glare of the war, I’m a surface / reflecting its awesome light”, Oksana Maksymchuk declares in Still City, her debut English-language collection. The key phrase comes next: ...

Patrick Clarke’s biography of the synth-pop duo Soft Cell is, he explains, “a book written from a distance”. Not yet born when the band rose to prominence in the early 1980s, Clarke only became a fan ...

There is little more personal than a recipe. Not those that fill cookbooks and magazines, honed, tested and edited by professionals. But rather those recipes that are passed on informally, and which ...

Benito Mussolini unveiled ancient Rome: the temples, tombs and public spaces buried beneath the modern city. By clearing medieval neighbourhoods and “liberating” ancient buildings, such as the ...

Scholars are difficult subjects for the biographer, since they spend – or fantasize about spending – most of their time at their desks. Jacob Grimm was a particularly reclusive character; his more ...