The origins of this study lie in John Brewer’s discovery, in Harvard’s Houghton Library, of a tatty visitors’ book which once belonged to the hermitage of San Salvatore on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius. The book, which covers a couple of years in the late 1820s, eloquently testifies to a busy tourist trade. Drawing on this information as well as a remarkable number of contemporary memoirs and letters and writings that he has hunted down, Brewer has produced a diverting and voluminous... read more

You long for sublime artists to be sublime people. Or, if they’re bad, to be magnificently so. Possessing ‘a vanity born of supreme egoism’, Claude Monet ‘believed his art conferred a right to good living’ and that ‘his welfare must be … the immediate concern of others’, writes Jackie Wullschläger, chief art critic of the Financial Times. With great honesty, Wullschläger records her subject’s wearisome scrounging letters and his propensity for petty and often pointless mendacity. At the end of his life, when he was... read more

You’re at a gathering. A stranger snaps a photo of you with a smartphone, then proceeds to tell you your name, your employer, where you live and perhaps your political affiliation. If this party trick sounds like the stuff of science fiction, it’s not. Face-recognition technology is nothing new. It’s widely used to unlock phones and other devices, and in a growing number of settings involving identity authentication, like airport security. You voluntarily register an image... read more

The foundation stone of the modern Austrian state was the so-called ‘victim myth’. Following the defeat of the Nazis in 1945, the idea took hold that Austria had been the first casualty of Hitler’s aggression when in 1938 it was incorporated into the Third Reich. Memories of ordinary Austrians waving Swastikas as German tanks rolled in, tossing flowers at stormtroopers and flashing smirks of approval as Jews were forced... read more

For much of the 20th century, economists lost interest in history. That was particularly true of neoclassical economists in the West during the Cold War. Beguiled by the notion that theirs was an absolute science amenable to pure mathematical abstraction, they turned their backs on the record of experience. ‘Economics became the science of the present, slightly related to the future … but fully disconnected from the past’, Branko... read more

Novelists seldom grow old gracefully. ‘All writers go off,’ as the late Martin Amis once put it, and while they are hardly unique in that respect, when writers go off the consequences can be dire. A late run of mediocrity has a way of souring a literary legacy, which is one reason why new books by distinguished writers make reviewers nervous. Have they finally gone off? Happily, J M Coetzee seems to be one of the rare exceptions; rather than running out of steam, he has slipped comfortably into a late style. The stories... read more