Keeping It Together

Belgium was saved from disintegration in the immediate postwar period by the pragmatism and farsightedness of its centrist political parties and their leaders. Do its politicians still retain those qualities?

A Single Volume Bound by Love

Clive James’s new Dante is the highly effective work of a poet who has absorbed tradition, who is aware of the demands of form, whose translations are imaginative and whose scholarship is immaculate.

Does Europe Exist?

Does culture reside only in particular nations and national traditions or can we speak of a European culture? And if we can, what might it be and how can we best preserve it?

Astonished at Everything

Generosity and largeness of vision seem to meet happily in the poems of Uruguayan-French writer Jules Supervielle, which seem to cover great distances in short spaces.

Varieties of Modernity

Relations between capitalism and the state have been crucial in Europe. Both, accommodating to claim-making from civil society, gave this model a distinctive concern with social solidarity.