A keen observer as well as celebrated wit, Arcimboldo created composite portraits that were both enjoyed as jokes and taken very seriously. Skokloster Castle, Skokloster The job of a renaissance court ...

Something very strange has been going on. Picking up the paperback of Ocean Vuong’s first novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, which has now sold more than a million copies, you encounter blurbs ...

Mine was an oblique induction into Brecht’s poems. Often in my teens I’d go for long walks in the Westphalian forests with my (English) father, who knew his German poetry, and if we were starting out ...