The bulletproof glass booth in which Adolf Eichmann (pictured) testified during his trial in Jerusalem.
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As a child of Hungarian Jews, reading Eichmann in Jerusalem was a revelation to Peter Christoff. Yet might the ‘Eichmann problem’ of criminal disregard apply, today to those exploiting fossil fuels?
Marble heads of four philosophers in the British Museum. From foreground: Socrates, Antisthenes, Chrysippos and Epicurus.
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Pierre Hadot sees philosophy as a guide to improving our contemporary lives.
Inuit hunters:
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All over the world, the territories of Indigenous peoples map onto regions of the richest and most persistent biodiversity. A book about hunter-gatherer Arctic peoples shows why.
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Augustine’s Confessions has become a modern classic because it feels so immediate and familiar to our current desire for self-understanding.
An anonymous 15th century painting of Isabella and Richard II.
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When Stephanie Trigg was a young reader, The Gentle Falcon, set in 1396, introduced her to the beauty and danger of the medieval world.
The university, and its pursuit of knowledge, was part of the colonial project. And historians, writes Satia, were key architects of empire.
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From the 18th century, historians taught us to understand the world as a story of linear progress. But this viewpoint made them architects of empire. History, writes Yves Rees, has blood on its hands.
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The old-fashioned Hollywood femme fatale leaps off the leopard skin rug to hijack the narrative in this lurid, avant-garde novel.
Close up of a citrus swallowtail butterfly.
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There are 900,000 described species of insects in the world. Field guides help us make sense of them.
Anais Nin, left, pictured in 1946.
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To a 17-year-old girl fresh out of convent school, Anaïs Nin’s diaries were a revelation. Nin found the words to describe inner worlds.
Children play with a dog in Bucha, Ukraine, on April 8.
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The poems in The Honey of Man may cast a harsh light on human cruelties and stupidities, but they avoid hopelessness or helplessness.
William Barak, Figures in possum skin cloaks, 1898.
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Can a poem tell us more about the past than a history book?
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John Woinarksi’s copy of this 1935 classic of environmental writing is older than him, mostly broken, much read and priceless.