When the writer David Foster Wallace died in 2008, he left behind a manuscript for an unfinished novel, The Pale King, as well as an oeuvre that has come to define him as the voice of a generation: ...

If there is one meeting of minds I’d love to drag out of history and into the AI era, it would be that shared by Alan Turing and Ludwig Wittgenstein. The real-life hookups between the young father of ...

“Politics,” the German sociologist Max Weber said, is “a strong and slow boring of hard boards.” That’s boring as a verb, of course, meaning drilling. (In German: “Ein starkes langsames Bohren von ...

In August 2023, a special adviser left the Ministry of Defence to become director of strategic engagement at German defence firm Helsing that November. The following February, less than a year after ...

There’s no telling what will make a nonfiction bestseller. Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time and the late Erich von Däniken’s junk archaeology about “ancient astronauts” both seem implausible ...

This is a deeply uncomfortable moment to be a member of the Jewish community. After the atrocities committed by Hamas on 7th October, killing 1,200, and Israel’s relentless bombardment of Gaza, ...

Fassbinder, Herzog, Wenders: from the 1960s onwards, Germany produced countless top-tier filmmakers. The most towering figure, though, was undoubtedly Alexander Kluge, who died this March at the age ...

Andy Burnham has announced an ambitious plan to create a Number 10 North, which is fine as far as it goes. But why stop there? If Britain is serious about devolving power, levelling up, rebalancing ...

On Patreon, you can pay Bob Dylan $5 a month to read his lectures, short stories and imagined “letters never sent” between historical figures, such as Fred Astaire and HG Wells. So far, so Dylan. You ...

How do you do a centenary exhibition for Marilyn Monroe? This is not as straightforward question as it seems, for Monroe was just not another movie star. And she was also not just a movie star. The ...

It is, apparently, none of our business. It’s an entirely private matter. A would-be prime minister trousers £5m from a billionaire living on the other side of the world. So what? Nobody cares. Mind ...

Prospect receives commission when you buy a book using this page. Thank you for supporting us. The art of writing jazz biography is, these days, a race against time. A mere decade and a half ago, ...