It’s a wonder that the Parthenon remains standing at all
From a temple to Athena, it became a Byzantine, then Latin, church, a mosque, a powder magazine and finally a ruin. Lord Elgin’s vandalism was hardly anything new
Why are we obsessed with Japanese fiction?
Imagine you come across a small café in a back alley of Tokyo where you can travel back in time…
Alexander Pushkin – Russia’s greatest letter-writer
Intimate, earthy and uninhibited, Pushkin’s letters, collected together, read like a novel and give an encyclopaedic view of 19th-century Russian life
