Printed Portraiture in Tudor and Early Stuart Britain

The National Portrait Gallery presents Making History: Printed Portraiture in Tudor and Early Stuart Britain, on view through December 9, 2007. Long before the age of photography, printed portraits served a growing public appetite to gaze upon the features of men and women whose exploits and achievements had excited public interest. From the mid-sixteenth century [...]

Why must authors be tied to their ethnicity?

The Caine prize for African writing – popularly known as the African Booker – was announced this week. It is awarded to a short story written in English by an African writer or writer from the African diaspora speaking of African issues. This pan-African literary award brings recognition to some of Africa’s most talented writers, [...]

V. G. Belinskii – Letter to N. V. Gogol’

Gogol’, born in Ukraine, became Russia’s most famous writer of prose in the 1830s. Belinskii, Russia’s most influential literary critic, praised Gogol’s work extravagantly, reading such satirical works as The Inspector General and Dead Souls as exposés of Russia’s social and political ills and thus as blows struck for liberation. Gogol’s personal views were extremely [...]

The unseen Islam

Is Islamic art mainly about geometry and calligraphy? Not at all, a controversial new exhibition of past masterpieces in London reveals. It can also be about erotic love of a very human kind. And could this fact help to fan the flames of controversy among fundamentalists yet again, after the Danish cartoons and Rushdie’s knighthood? [...]

The magnificent seven? Are these the best British films ever?

On the grounds that Johnny Depp likes it and that there are fans who can recite backwards every line uttered by Uncle Monty (Richard Griffiths), Withnail and I, right, can safely be described as the most cultish British film comedy in living memory. Its great virtue is that it is funny. One of the continuing [...]

Guardians of a European Dimension

At the end of the Second World War, Albania cut itself off politically and culturally from the outside world, accusing the literatures of Europe of being decadent and reactionary, interpreting the term avant-garde as a threat to socialist literature and casting an impervious ideological net over the writers of the nation. Yet, there was a [...]