Portraits

portraits

Sigmar Hillelson — the German Jewish pioneer behind the BBC’s Arabic broadcasts

Sigmar Hillelson, the German Jewish Orientalist who led the BBC’s Near Eastern Service between 1940 and 1945, played a crucial role in establishing Arabic broadcasting as a source ..

Alex White February 27, 2024

portraits

Carlo Porta, poet who defended Milan’s dispossessed

The poet Carlo Porta gave the Milanese voice in their native tongue, fiercely rejecting the popular notion that good writing could only be done in Italian.

Andrea Valentino February 15, 2024

portraits

The dialects of Joseph Wright

Joseph Wright, author of the six-volume English Dialect Dictionary, and one of the 19th century's most remarkable examples of social mobility, only learned to read at 15. He left a..

Sarah Ogilvie January 29, 2024

portraits

Peter Viereck: Psychoanalyst of Nazism

Motivated by a wish to understand his own father's affinity for the Nazis, historian Peter Viereck argued that Hitler was the culmination of an intellectual trend in German thought..

Samuel Rubinstein January 10, 2024

portraits

Daniel Patrick Moynihan: Warrior of the liberal centre

Over his long career as a scholar, presidential adviser and senator, Daniel Patrick Moynihan an was avid practitioner of liberal centrism against the threat of expanding government..

Jeffery Tyler Syck January 8, 2024

portraits

Jean Eustache: the outsider who reshaped French cinema

The filmmaker Jean Eustache's interest in la France profonde, his sense of national history and his sardonic scepticism about the May ’68 ideologues mark him out from his Nouvelle ..

Muriel Zagha October 30, 2023

portraits

Eunus, the slave who would be king

In the second century BC, Eunus led the biggest slave uprising Rome was to see until Spartacus’ rebellion sixty years later. His story is of the power of charisma and the tragedy o..

Orlando Gibbs October 17, 2023

portraits

Paolo Sarpi: opponent of papal power

Though little-known today, the Venetian friar, theologian and state propagandist for the Serene Republic shaped the political debate of the turbulent seventeenth century.

Eloise Davies October 3, 2023

portraits

Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin — the first and only British woman to win a Nobel Prize in science

The chemist and crystallographer made pioneering discoveries, including determining the structure of insulin in 1969 after 35 years of work.

Patricia Fara June 22, 2023