Books

The imaginative liberties on show here are the trademark of director Thomas Ostermeier

Budapest endured Nazi rule, the Holocaust and then Stalin – how can anywhere recover from that?

In a new book, the author argues that faced with multiple global crises, western civilisation is under threat – from the inside

The populist commentator’s book on UK universities is filled with unoriginal argument, cherry-picked evidence and enormous self-regard. If he truly believes what he’s written, the only suitable response is pity

The original great European cookbooks may be filled with recipes that we no longer use, but they take us back to the past in a poignant way

A sumptuously illustrated book of interviews with the director reveals his extraordinary love of the monumental

A compilation of European literature, compiled by the son of Thomas Mann, is a reminder of the continent’s cultural power

At the late former deputy prime minister’s funeral, it became clear that Britain could do with some politicians like him today

The Slovenian writer who defied the Gestapo during an eight-year journey round the world holds lessons for us all in the era of Trump

The famous Grimm Brothers’ tales were originally penned by Giovan Battista Basile, an unknown Italian noble poet from Naples

The making of an extraordinary memento that survived the concentration camp and a death march designed to bury the truth

A proposal to make authors opt out of having their work harvested by tech giants is akin to asking shopkeepers to opt out of shoplifters

A new book reveals why we are so polarised by the battle between left an right– and what we can do to lessen the gap between “us” and “them”

For the west, when dealing with Russia, it turned out that the Cold War was our comfort zone. But after the Berlin Wall came down, how did the Russian dream die?

UK publishing is richer than ever – yet most authors scrape to make a living, libraries are under threat and Brexit adds unwelcome red tape

The clamour for social justice got waylaid by too much virtue-signalling and too little action. Trump says it’s dead. But it is needed more than ever

MAGA’s resurgence means that works by George Orwell, Khaled Hosseini, Anne Frank and even Agatha Christie are under threat

We’ll need mechanisms in place to keep us sane and what better mechanism is there to achieve that than getting stuck in to a really good book?

If you don’t someone else will tell it for you – and chances are you won’t like what you hear

The story of a family’s French holiday interrupted by the apocalypse tops our round-up of the best books of 2024

A beautiful memoir about the ugly side of Europe tops our round-up of 2024’s best non-fiction

Photographer Andrew McConnell set out to record cosmonauts in Kazakhstan – but found the local people infinitely more fascinating

First published in 1924, his masterpiece Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain) is a highbrow ode to chilling

Our editor-at-large’s rundown of the pick of the week’s streaming, cinema, theatre and books

An Israeli startup’s plan to use AI to publish 8,000 books a year sounds like the death of quality

A 1532 first edition of Machiavelli’s The Prince, which are vanishingly hard to come by, has just come on the market

The German artist returns with a playful book that shakes things up by bringing the surreal into the everyday

How a habitual jailbird became one of Germany’s most famous authors by writing about a Wild West he’d never visited

The former German chancellor has played it smart again by shrouding her memoirs in secrecy ahead of their release

From Sally Bowles to George Smiley by way of Kreuzberg and Alexanderplatz, the best books about Berlin

Too centralised, too short term, too obsessed with Twitter, our political system is a dysfunctional mess. If we don’t fix it, we’ll all suffer

There’s pain and glory in The Last Dream – a patchy collection from the Spanish film-maker – but its highlight is all about his mother