Which version of “The Metamorphosis” or “Crime and Punishment” should you choose? In a particularly well-stocked library or bookshop, you could find many different English translations.
China’s Xi Xinping had trialled his COVID lockdown measures on what he callously called the ‘virus’ of the Uighurs, writes Stan Grant. COVID lockdowns are now over, but the trace of tyranny remains.
The promised benefits of lethal injection – a quick, painless death – have never come true. There’s not even agreement about which drugs are best for executions.
It is a truth universally acknowledged that the first sentence of a novel sets the tone. Our new column, On Writing, explores the wonderful world of opening lines: from Tolstoy to Elmore Leonard.
Even Nobel-Prize winners can be melancholy. This is one lesson we can learn from Albert Camus’ life by the end of the 1950s. Camus was catapulted to public fame in his late twenties by the uncanny novella…
Cases of plague have been reported in the Chinese city of Yumen, where a man has died of the disease. Control measures taken by the authorities include travel restrictions in and out of the city, and 151…
On 7 February 1946 we find J Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, writing a letter to “Special Agent in Charge” at the New York field office, to draw his attention to one ALBERT CANUS, who is “reportedly…
A student came up to me after class the other day and said, “So what is this ‘Becksistentialism’ all about then?” I want to begin to answer that question by defining the negative: Sir Alex Ferguson is…