The president’s inflammatory rhetoric is informed by two centuries of Russian nationalist thought centring on a distrust of Europe and a mission to recover all the lands of “Ancient Rus”

Investigating the slave-owners of the Sahara, where more than 100,000 people were born into inherited captivity

Revisiting the thinkers who challenged the scientific method’s claims to have a monopoly on the truth and offer privileged access to reality

Kurt Vonnegut at 100

Britain has never warmed to Rubens, whose finest works can be seen in Antwerp

The great man’s peerless poetry is not the “soppy stuff” of cheap romanticism, but a harsh, unsparing — and often beautiful — look at the world

So-called “radical” performance art is little more than a publicly-funded alliance between the art establishment and faux-rebellious poseurs

Farmers’ markets are a rip-off aimed at food snobs and posturing fools with more money than sense

Ayn Rand’s vile philosophy was one of the crudest ever to be taken seriously, but attracts the devotion of fundamentalists for whom she could do no wrong

Don’t sneer at those who challenge the vested interests of the elite