Friars transformed the relationship of the church to laymen by taking religion outside to public and domestic spaces. Mendicant commitment to apostolic poverty bound friars to donors in an exchange of donations in return for intercessory prayers and...

Rising to a triumphant height of 630 feet, the Gateway Arch in St. Louis is a revered monument to America's western expansion. Envisioned in 1947 but not completed until the mid-1960s, the arch today attracts millions of tourists annually and is one...

For the Classic Maya, who flourished in and around the Yucatan peninsula in the first millennium AD, artistic materials were endowed with an internal life. Far from being inert substances, jade, flint, obsidian and wood held a vital essence, agency a...

James Boswell (1740-1795), best known as the biographer of Samuel Johnson, was also a lawyer, journalist, diarist and an insightful chronicler of a pivotal epoch in Western history. This fascinating collection, edited by Paul Tankard, presents a gene...

After several million years of jostling for ecological space, only one survivor from a host of hominid species remains standing: us. Human beings are extraordinary creatures, and it is the unprecedented human brain that makes them so. In this delight...

Kiki Dimoula's poetry – the most praised and prized in contemporary Greek literature – is a paradox, both mysteriously intricate and widely popular. Her magic lens defamiliarizes all that is familiar, compressing distances between far-flung realms, c...

The flourishing of photography as a medium in the mid-19th century coincided with a rise in curiosity about China on the part of the Western world. As the number of foreigners living and travelling in China increased, early photographs of China were...

The year 2014 marks the one hundredth anniversary of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, and the beginning of the conflict that would become known as World War I. In addition to the devastating loss of human life, the Great War...

Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux (1827-1875) was an extraordinarily gifted sculptor – the greatest in 19th-century France before Rodin – and embodied the emotionally charged artistic climate of his era. The passionate Carpeaux comes alive in this handsome new...

Margaret Cavendish Bentinck, the 2nd Duchess of Portland (1715-1785), was one of the wealthiest women in 18th-century Britain. She collected fine and decorative arts (the Portland Vase was her most famous acquisition), but her great love was natural...