America’s official chief diplomat is the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, but so far his activities have been fairly limited. Instead, the role of principal US emissary is currently filled by the ...

John XXIII, the pope who initiated the council in 1962, described it as an aggiornamento, a ‘bringing up to date’, an attempt ...

In the more fortunate and vastly different condition of life under civil government, the ideal of independence had become a ...

Admirers of Morris the revolutionary have shared his uncertainties. George Bernard Shaw thought Morris’s late-life addiction to scribbling prose romances a lowering hobby – why not take up making ...

The version of Khovanshchina that Mussorgsky left behind when he died was as messy as the history it depicts. He began working on the opera in 1872, the bicentennial of Peter the Great’s birth. For ...

Classic’ may not be quite the right word for this scary, messy film – it’s about forms of rage that don’t ...

In a less frequented corner of YouTube, the late Marxist philosopher G.A. Cohen lives on in a few comic skits. Among the funniest of these party pieces are two diatribes on ‘the German idea of freedom ...