Engelsberg ideas

‘Nixonmaxxing’ is a thing, apparently, though despite the attempts to revise the reputation of the 37th president – the man behind the greatest political scandal of recent times – you would still not buy a used car from him.

Earlier this year, shortly after the second US-Iran war erupted, Britain was dramatically reminded of its Mediterranean role, or apparent lack of one, when the Sovereign Base Area of Akrotiri on Cyprus was struck by a drone believed to have been launched…

In Part I of Gulliver’s Travels, the anonymous Lilliputian courtier who tells Gulliver about the plot being hatched against him by the Emperor and his senior advisers also tells him what the Lilliputians plan to do with his corpse once he has been starved…

Whether it be the current protests and riots, PSG’s Champions League victories, or the 2023 riots (when over 2,500 buildings were burned or damaged, while rioters rammed a burning car into a mayor’s family home with his wife and two children inside), Fran…

First Among Equals: Visions of Equality Before Egalitarianism, Teresa M Bejan, Belknap Harvard, £29.95 The principle of equality is the foundational principle of modern normative political theorising.

Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (1912) is a peerless tale of secret desire slowly unmasked.

‘A fit of vomiting, the saturnalia of madness’: this is how the French writer George Sand described to her friend Flaubert the Paris Commune of 1871.

On 1 May 2004, a few dozen demonstrators gathered in front of the huge building that was once KGB headquarters in central Moscow.

Arson is all the rage in France.

Germans generally admire the British.

The second instalment of Antonin Baudry’s two-part biopic of General de Gaulle, De Gaulle: Liberté, is, if anything, even better than the first, De Gaulle: Résistance – in which de Gaulle manoeuvres his way into the driving seat of the French cause, loses…

In May of this year, the Polish filmmaker Paweł Pawlikowski received the Best Director award at the Cannes Film Festival for his black-and-white film Fatherland, which tells the story of the great novelist Thomas Mann’s return to Germany after the Second…

Behind the urban disorder in France lies an equally serious fiscal predicament.

Last week, I was briefed by military colleagues just back from Ukraine.

The magic is in the details.

There is a first time for everything, including being tear-gassed.

When the Soviet Union chose Kim Il Sung to lead what would become North Korea at the end of the Second World War, his patrons in Moscow helped him launch a personality cult modelled after that of Joseph Stalin – just as they did for the Soviet Union’s oth…

The Nord Stream Conspiracy, Bojan Pancevski, Hutchinson, £25 On the night of 26 September 2022, the seabed near Bornholm in the eastern Baltic was violently shaken.

Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey, released in July, puts xenia – the sacred bond between host and guest, which he renders plainly as ‘Zeus’s law’ – at the centre of his epic.

The Collected Dialogues of Plato, edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, with a new foreword by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, Princeton University Press, £35 For a university student in the 1980s, The Collected Dialogues of Plato edited by Edith H…

The penultimate point in Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points for peace negotiations to end the First World War was the most idealised of its goals.

I met Joshua Wong in 2013.

Essential reading, viewing, and listening from the EI editors.

In the concluding chapter of Voltaire’s 1759 philosophical novel Candide, the philosopher Pangloss and the eponymous hero, finding themselves in Constantinople, go to visit ‘a very famous dervish, who passed for the greatest philosopher in Turkey’.

On the walls of the papal Sala Regia in Rome, just across from a rather gruesome depiction of the St Bartholomew’s Massacre (1572) by Giorgio Vasari, author of The Lives of the Artists, you can find another fresco, also by Vasari, on an unusual theme: Pope

The final series of Star Wars: The Clone Wars, perhaps the most unduly neglected and perceptive sci-fi series of our times, takes us to Level 1313 of Coruscant, where we encounter Trace and Rafa Martez, two sisters who survive through repair work, laundry…

Like any self-appointed highest honour, the Nobel Prize in Literature often fails to satisfy demand.

In 1979, weaponised anthrax escaped from a bioweapons facility in Sverdlovsk, Russia, killing at least 66 people as it spread southward through the city of 1.2 million inhabitants.

In the winter of 2014, Ukraine faced a peculiar institutional trap.

The Sea-King and the Sorceress, Neil Price, Allen Lane, £30 Around the year 1080, an elderly woman was buried in Täby, a few kilometres northeast of Stockholm.

The images of French streets thronged with rioters, with cars, pyramids of wheelie bins, even schools set ablaze and violent clashes with police are startling, especially perhaps as they have appeared mere days after footage of large and peaceful Parisian…

The ‘Saint’ in her name was authentic, but not really necessary.

Essential reading, viewing, and listening from the EI editors.

Thought experiments have always played an outsized role in the philosophy of mind, in part because the central problem is so difficult to settle by observation alone.

Issue in doubt.

Paris during Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s youth must have been a place of tumult.

Great Powers: A History of Britain and Germany, Jan Rüger, Allen Lane, £40.

Last week, a friend told me that he has a new girlfriend with whom he does not share a language.

The knife-edge presidential election campaign underway in Brazil pits a far-right candidate, the eldest son of former president Jair Bolsonaro, against a populist democratic socialist seeking an unprecedented fourth term as president of Latin America’s la…

This autumn, the music of Steve Reich is reverberating across the world as he celebrates his 90th birthday.

Who is the most unpleasant character in all of fiction?

When Halifax moved, he could be graceful and grave and shy simultaneously, like a tall water bird wading in the shallows.

Essential reading, viewing, and listening from the EI editors.

On 3 January this year, the US carried out a spectacular operation in Venezuela.

On 15 July 1983, the Izmir-born photojournalist, Ergun Çağatay, was at the Turkish Airlines ticket counter at Paris Orly Airport waiting to fly home to celebrate his wife’s birthday.

Even before the Nazis came to power in Germany, propaganda had acquired a bad reputation in Britain, where its association with exaggeration and deception dated back to the Great War.

Wine: a Global History, Kathleen Burk, Profile Books, £30 The World Atlas of Wine, ninth edition, Hugh Johnson, Jancis Robinson and Julia Harding, Mitchell Beazley, £60 One of the things that struck me while reading Kathleen Burk’s epic Wine: a Global His…

Southwest of Tokyo lies the quaint city of Nara.

What Happened to Liberal Democracy?

In 1692 Robert Molesworth was promptly relieved of his duties as William of Orange’s envoy to Denmark.