Rebay and af Klint, both strong-willed artists, were dedicated to their beliefs in the potential of art to hold spiritual value.
Niccolo Machiavelli, Renaissance statesman and political theorist, saw factional politics as essential to the prosperity of the Roman Empire and his native Florence. Are today’s partisan divisions as beneficial?
The constitutional order is changing as citizens become alienated and demand more say. Americans must take care that their habits of law – the ethos that makes the US exceptional – are not swept away.
Britain’s reverence for its National Health Service was developing long before the post-war promise of a New Jerusalem.
The human ability to cooperate is what elevates us above apes and monkeys.
John Hughes’s films re-established and updated the American dream for a new generation. His complex legacy helps us understand what went so wrong.
Donatello, one of Florence’s most distinguished sons, produced sculpture worthy of the ages.
To argue that Thatcher attacked the post-war dream is to caricature, not illuminate, her importance to British history.
Karl Marx was wrong about revolutions – in practice, they beget Caesars and Napoleons.
Amid the tumult of the 1970s, it appeared the traditional country house had gone into irreversible decline – but it was too early to write it off.
For Nietzsche, decadence is more than a propensity for sexual excess or luxurious indulgence: its existence reveals a fundamental level of human disunity.
‘Ihyou’ is a concept that runs through much of modern Japanese design – in searching for it, architects challenge the limits of form.
Despite globalisation, the nation state retains its privileged position in world politics.
The French Revolution – with its ‘left’ and ‘right’ wings of the National Assembly – created political ideology. Nothing was ever quite the same again.
As a result of President Erdogan’s embrace of two interlinked geopolitical concepts, ‘Strategic Depth’ and ‘Blue Homeland’, Turkey faces international isolation.
Russia has never quite reconciled its traditional culture of ‘joint responsibility’ with the rule of law.
The creation of samurai identity involved all classes of Japanese society, but the warriors were as much objects of mockery as reverence.
The Victorians saw Plato’s Republic as an indispensable guide to reform of the public sphere – we should follow their lead.
Over a century after its inception, the central tenets of Theosophy continue to resurface in art created today.
Even with all its data and technology, contemporary conflict fits uneasily with our definitions of modernity.
The West, more specifically the United States, with its major allies alongside it, has been chasing the ‘fun wars’ for 40 years and serially coming up empty.
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