640pp. University of Chicago Press. £32 (US $39.95). In 2011, builders in the Rio de Janeiro docklands uncovered the ruins of the Cais do Valongo, a wharf where, between 1780 and 1831, 800,000 ...

Caroline Moorehead salutes the energetic brilliance of the singer Josephine Baker and Aaron Peck discusses the past, present and future of the avant garde We're joined by Harriet Baker, the winner of ...

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In Pablo Picasso’s portrait of Aimé Césaire, drawn after they met at the Soviet-organized World Congress of Intellectuals in Defence of Peace in Poland in August 1948, a man with a long, thin neck and ...

“Few writers are able to create a different world for you to live in”, the TLS said of a new novel, in 1963, “yet Miss [Victoria] Lucas in The Bell Jar has done just this.” This was quite a debut, ...

The Eerie Book is a compendium of supernatural short stories and extracts, edited by the Scottish author Margaret Armour in 1898 and beautifully reproduced with a new introduction by the super­natural ...

“The need to go home … hit me like grief”. Mairéad, the protagonist of Elaine Garvey’s debut novel, is experiencing the feeling of bereavement that often comes when, at the brink of “proper” adulthood ...

The religious landscape in Britain is undergoing significant transformations that remain only partially understood. Statistical data indicate a general trend of declining religiosity, which is in part ...

Do we really need another retelling of ancient Irish tales? Well, perhaps. Lisa M. Bitel, in her lively and insightful introduction to Otherworld – her own versions of nine stories selected from three ...

The title of Isabel Galleymore’s second collection of poems is a translation of Konrad Lorenz’s term Kindenschema – that is, the wide-eyed, round-faced quality that makes us Ah and Aw. Cuteness ...

The chaos agents who drive Christopher Bollen’s latest thriller belong to two of the most easily overlooked demographics: an old woman and a child. The yawning age gap between the eighty-one-year-old ...

On April 14, 1935, a black blizzard blew through the American prairie. “The sun sank into a black cloud”, writes Karen Russell in her new novel, The Antidote. “Buried alive, at a shocking altitude, by ...