Sir Peter Russell (1913–2006) was King Alfonso XIII Professor of Spanish Studies at Oxford from 1953 until his retirement in 1981. He was also Director of Portuguese Studies, and the author of a ...

Toby Lichtig assesses the latest recreation of Bob Dylan, the man and the myth, and David Gallagher discusses an academic and spy who inspired the work of Javier Marías Boris Dralyuk on a compelling ...

Early in Josephine Tey’s classic mystery The Daughter of Time (1951), Inspector Grant, laid up with a broken leg and vainly seeking distraction with a heap of the latest bestsellers, remarks ...

Reading, we all know, is a peculiar act. It takes us out of ourselves into realms we might otherwise have missed – deeper, wider, stranger, perhaps launching us backwards or forwards in time, or into ...

Australia has often been called a “new country,” but its poetry has seldom been thought of in these terms. Les Murray (1938–2019), still the country’s best-known poet, memorably styled himself as a ...

Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius (c.480–524 CE), statesman, philosopher and scholar whose aim was to translate the entire works of Plato and Aristotle into Latin, was a prominent figure in late ...

One notable simile in Antony and Cleopatra is uttered by a character of Shakespeare’s own invention, Scarus, according to whom Antony absents himself from the Battle of Actium “like a doting mallard”.

On the one hand, there is Ion of Chios – not to mention Lamprocles, Odysseus and Phemios the poet. And on the inevitable other hand? Well, there is the town of Ballynahinch and the tricky road to ...

One hesitates to differ from Jonathan Rée in a matter of Marxian doxography (January 17), but, although Marx did indeed receive a doctorate in 1841 (from the University of Jena), he did not receive it ...

Benjamin T. Smith’s books include The Roots of Conservatism in Mexico: Catholicism, society, and politics in the Mixteca Baja, 1750-1962, 2012. His most recent book is The Dope: The real history of ...