Thriller
Awful states
Two political thrillers reveal the intimate cruelties of life under dictatorship
Final frontiers
Adam LeBor on two TV series that are set in border regions, that feature engaging female characters and that are beautifully filmed
Murders for late May
From psychological character studies to witty and fast-paced detective novels, Jeremy Black rounds up the best crime fiction for late Spring
A very English take on espionage
Alexander Larman on the newest release in Mick Herron’s best-selling and critically acclaimed Jackson Lamb crime series: Slough House
Apocalypse soon?
Civilisations always rise and fall — ours is no exception
A very British crank
Bertrand Russell is almost too familiar a figure to be worth remembering
I miss the Simon Ravens
Twinkly-eyed twentieth century mischief makers have crashed out of fashion
The bacchanalia of Kawanabe Kyōsai
This exhibition at the Royal Academy revels in the artist’s versatility
Labour’s Wakefield win is nothing to crow over
Maybe turning Labour into the “some-women-have-penises” party isn’t such a popular electoral strategy after all
The renewal of Englishness
Journalist James Cowley builds a national identity from an excavation of incidents
War without end: Putin’s Syria model
The war in Ukraine shows tragic parallels to the earlier conflict
King of the clay court
On the red clay of Stade Roland Garros, Nadal is God
Germany in the shadow of Napoleon
Jeremy Black and Graham Stewart discuss how the wars with revolutionary France reshaped the German lands
Charge of the Lightweight Brigade
Into the valley of death rode the 358
There’s more to 1922 than just Woolf, Joyce, and Eliot
We should pay attention to Katherine Mansfield and Elizabeth von Arnim