The loneliest metropolis

Lola Young Eight Weeks Looking back, moving forwards, defying the odds 336pp. Penguin. Paperback, £10.99. Lola Young has been a crossbench member of the House of Lords since 2004. She is also an emeri

“This tremendous aggregate of a book has many of the characteristics of a Festschrift assembled to honour some Great Influencer”: so, in 1973, the architectural historian Priscilla Metcalf began the f

On the morning of 9 January 1905 (22 January on the New Style calendar Soviet Russia later adopted), a crowd of striking workers marched peacefully through Saint Petersburg towards the Winter Palace,

John P. Murphy New Deal Art 336pp. Thames and Hudson. Paperback, £19.99. Seymour Fogel’s “Wealth of the Nation”, installed in 1942 in a federal building in Washington DC, depicts a group of workers en

Who, today, remembers Robert Vas? His Refuge England (1959), a partly autobiographical account of a Hungarian migrant trying to make sense of London—its confusing streets and dizzying profusion of sig

In January 1918, a few months after Lenin’s Bolsheviks had captured the Winter Palace in Petrograd, Rhoda Power left the house in Rostov-on-Don where she was employed as a governess and wandered throu