Late stories of a self-styled ‘arguer with the world’

JOHANN KERNER saw the woman coming out of the darkness. She looked ancient and she moved as slowly as a snail, her back bent. She was the most likely source of information he had seen on his travels.

© HEADER DRAWINGS BY MICHAEL HADDAD/HEART Leaves Byung-Chul ...

Reading Laura Mauro’s “Japanese Toilet Ghosts” [FT459:30-35], reminded me of a less well known fear in the Western world, which –according to the modern rabbinical Internet resource site TheTorah.com

Did you know that Thomas Müntzer, leader of the German Peasants’ War in 1525, used a rainbow flag to rally his followers? It’s an aptly exuberant image for the radical charisma of Müntzer, and for the

Whether winter-faded ferns, the spindly harvestman or the tyrannical stare of an irate chicken, through-lines from the prehistoric to our modern age are all around us in November, says John Lewis-Stempel