There’s nothing wrong, of course, with taking one’s Crime and Punishment neat, without footnotes, introduction or weighty biography, sans everything except Dostoevsky’s incandescent text (as recast by your pick of fourteen translators). Countless readers, and all good formalists, have done just that, not least because the old translations tended to have no notes. Why interrupt the spell, the morbid giddiness... read more

Two 1930s prints hung in Jenny Uglow’s home as a child: The Eight by Cyril Power and Bringing in the Boat by Sybil Andrews. It never occurred to her to wonder about them, and then it did. The result is this marvellous book. The prints were linocuts. Between the wars linocutting, ‘a small yet significant corner of avant-garde art’, became a craze. It’s probably still true, as Sybil reflected at the end of her long and productive career, that few people understand... read more

For much of her sixteen years in office as Germany’s chancellor, Angela Dorothea Merkel, née Kasner, has been ‘a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma’, to quote Churchill’s famous dictum on the Soviet Union. Her meteoric rise defied all rational explanation. A woman from East Germany, a scientist with an inbuilt aversion to straddling the political stage and mounting the bully pulpit: how could she succeed in a country with... read more

‘You’ll never understand what Albanian communism was like,’ begins one testimony in Margo Rejmer’s Mud Sweeter Than Honey. ‘Somewhere on the edge of Europe there was a North Korea, a bunker state, a fortress state … you can’t describe life in a country that was a prison.’ Albanians lived and died under communism for forty-six years. It was a period of prolonged human suffering, of which the outside world still knows little. Even in... read more

At the start of H G Wells’s 1909 novel Tono-Bungay, the narrator explains that most people continue through life in a neat line from beginning to end. However, there is ‘another kind of life’, something more like ‘a miscellaneous tasting’ of its possibilities. Wells might have been writing about himself, because few writers have been so full of contradictions: a socialist who clung on to... read more

This must have been how Leipzig saw its future in the 1910s, I said to myself as I took in the measure of its massive Hauptbahnhof and the long row of six ironwork train sheds distantly modelled, as all railway stations are, on the arches of Europe’s cathedrals (that’s why ‘sheds’ doesn’t seem quite right). A hundred years after its construction, this railway station, Europe’s largest in terms of floor space, still dominates the... read more