Simone De Beauvoir The Image of HerTranslated by Lauren Elkin208pp, Penguin Vintage Classics, £14.99 The first reviews of Simone De Beauvoir’s novel Les Belles images (1966) were dismissive. Some crit

Blinding: The Left Wing Mircea Cǎrtǎrescu, trans. by ...

Alice Loxton EleanorA 200-mile walk in search of England’slost queen352pp. Pan Macmillan. £22. Many are commemorated in stone, but few so grandly as Eleanor of Castile (d. 1290). Following her unexpec

Nouvelle Vague Various cinemas Blue Moon Available on streaming services Though cinema is the youngest art form – the tenth Muse, or seventh art, as the French have sometimes called it – it isn’t nece

A letter, a book and two paintings by Tracey Emin; right, Ruth Fairlight’s copy of The Colossus Ruth Fainlight and Alan Sillitoe were both in their twenties when they met in a bookshop in Nottingham.

Last April, a surprising photograph (see near right) appeared on the Wikipedia page devoted to Jeanne Duval, the long-term mistress of Charles Baudelaire and the “Black Venus” who inspired some of the