The sacred springs of mythology are considered the source of inspiration for the finest poets – both ancient and modern. But like poetry itself, they remain elusive.
Putin has created a world divided between the democracies and authoritarian countries. This new Iron Curtain line stretches from Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea to China.
Historical influences permeate Russian grand strategy. Operation Barbarossa remains seared into its military’s psyche. This has important consequences for how Euro-Atlantic policymakers should think about the Russia threat.
Pachyderms have proved remarkably versatile to European history – used, among other things, as symbols of conquering and colonisation, the lives of these creatures, and the way they have been treated, can stand as metaphor for the Continent’s own relationship to the rest of the world.
The Russian president’s ambition to restore his country’s Soviet-era influence is solely in his own interest – at the expense of the nation’s long-term security and prosperity.
The wildly-popular twelve-minute performances are a fascinating microcosm of the country’s wider political issues.
The hit TV show inevitably creates literary and historical resonances, but its classical references are always on the money.
Many German literary exiles flourished briefly in post-war Los Angeles – and their legacy lives on in a variety of ways.
The recent spectacle has held Italians and political observers spellbound — but the system’s twists and turns are also strangely dispiriting.
Truffaut’s interest in people – their emotional lives, their relationships with one another – continues to fascinate. His films are about childhood, adolescence, love, loss, desire, betrayal, guilt, trust and solitude, not parallel universes and super-heroes.
Having practically saved Europe from a communist takeover, Poland’s head of state Joseph Pilsudski’s insistence a century ago on a strong, independent Ukraine, protected by the Western democracies from Russian intimidation and threats, resonates powerfully today.
Our culture of immediate information-sharing puts military operations in jeopardy.
The weather was more than just a backdrop to Orwell’s narratives – it shaped his life and art in profound and unexpected ways.
In 1812, the brutally cold Russian winter helped defend Moscow and defeat Napoleon’s army. In 2022, Vladimir Putin will be hoping the ground freezes to allow his conventional forces to engage in fighting.
Untangling abstract words from one language to another is a subjective task – and translations often reveal as much about their translator as their original text
For all his qualities as a filmmaker, Peter Jackson’s representation of Denethor shows how he is unable to fuse the genius of Tolkien and the rich sensibility he brought to bear in what he termed ‘the cauldron of story’ – the common weal of imagination that produced the great sagas, Old English epics and folklore – into his own art.
Modern attempts to categorise phenomena as varied as mental illness should be reevaluated. Wittgenstein’s family resemblance concept points to the folly of labelling any number of behaviours under one ever-expanding banner.
Classical and novel appear antithetical but a search for the new is evident in some of the oldest literary works.
Santa Claus is famous for his; today’s hipsters accessorise them – but the fashion for facial hair can be traced all the way back to Ancient Rome.
The patrician nature of Italian education takes students on a one-way journey of factual regurgitation – but sometimes cracks in the system let a little light in.
In Ancient Athens, ostracism, a mechanism for exiling citizens written into its laws, was thought to play a pivotal role in preserving the health of the city-state. But how did it play out in practice?
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