What an amazing behemoth of a book! I’ve been lugging it around for weeks. Nearly a thousand letters: the intimate correspondence of Albert Camus and Maria Casarès. When they first met in Paris – on D-Day, 1944 – Camus had already published L’Etranger (1942; The Outsider). Born and raised in Algeria, he was in Paris when the Second World War broke out, and later joined the French Resistance... read more

In the first weeks of 1946, Lee Krasner and Jackson Pollock started work on a new project. The couple, in their mid-thirties, had moved from New York City to a modest farmhouse in the Long Island hamlet of Springs a few months before. Each was fleeing something. Krasner, in the mid-1940s, had gone through a creative block that resulted in the works she was to call her ‘gray slabs’ – flat, lifeless canvases from which she had tried, and failed, to coax an image. ... read more

In Mexico City, where I write this, the birth rate is significantly less than one child per woman (0.79), lower even than in South Korea (0.80). In the city’s upscale borough of Benito Juárez, full of urban professionals and historic sites, the dearth of children is especially striking... read more

Some years ago, a prominent animal-behaviour scientist hosted a colleague at his field station devoted to the study of chimpanzees. Talking together on top of the observation tower, the pair glanced at the apes but mostly stayed absorbed in conversation. Then a female chimpanzee named Thai began to scream and hit herself in dramatic fashion. In response to her outburst, other chimpanzees rushed to embrace, hold and kiss her. Now the colleagues’ attention was riveted on the primates below. ... read more

In 1828, American artist Sarah Goodridge sent the recently widowed senator Daniel Webster a self-portrait miniature – apparently ‘in an attempt to seduce him’. Carefully concealed in a small box and intricately rendered in watercolour over a luminous ivory surface, it depicted nothing but the artist’s bare, delicately stippled, carefully individualised breasts. As private in form as it was intimate in subject, the painting was a significant departure from Goodridge’s public-facing output... read more

In the Western mind, Japan is often reduced to a set of stereotypes, of which one is the yakuza, the criminal syndicates known for their harsh codes of loyalty. They continue to be romanticised in films, video games and comics even though they are a spent force: their ranks fell to 17,600 last year, a record low, from more than 80,000 some twenty years ago. They are ageing, squeezed by antigang laws and edged out by tokuryū, criminals who operate through the internet on an ad hoc basis. In 2022, the Tokyo-based group Anegasaki-kai... read more