Kyiv’s unorthodox approach to reforming its public institutions has been to bring in experts from outside. But they will only have an impact if given the right powers.

Though the Vikings are famous for their long sea journeys, most of them lived settled lives as farmers. The archaeologist Neil Price believes their stories are just as interesting.

France’s riots may carry echoes of 1789 and 1968, and of a long tradition of taking to the streets, but they are also the product of a stranger, more troubling side of contemporary France.

Her performance as Eve Kendall in ‘North by Northwest’, Alfred Hitchcock’s unique, surreal masterpiece, will never be forgotten.

The EI Podcast brings you weekly conversations and audio essays from leading writers, thinkers and historians. Hosted by Alastair Benn and Paul Lay. Find the EI Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or ...

DJ Taylor's meditation on the author of 'The Lord of the Rings' is incisive and thoughtful, even for those left cold by Middle-earth.

Thought experiments such as Nick Bostrom's 'paperclip maximiser' tell us less about artificial intelligence than about our own intuitions and fears.

A record victory for Latvia’s pro-Ukraine prime minister was accompanied by a surge for populist parties in the country’s lowest-ever general election turnout.

AI-powered earbuds that translate in real time are remarkable tools. But doing the hard work of learning another language offers something more: a new way of seeing the world.

No painter took the passing pleasures of Parisian life more seriously than Renoir.

Jan Rüger’s erudite study makes a compelling case for seeing the bond between Britain and Germany as a driving force in European history.

AI-powered earbuds that translate in real time are remarkable tools. But doing the hard work of learning another language offers something more: a new way of seeing the world.

Historian Kathleen Burk speaks to Max Mitchell about the long history of humanity's relationship with wine.

The Brazilian election is being viewed as a referendum on Donald Trump’s ability to reel in Latin America’s largest economy and last major left-wing holdout.

As Steve Reich turns 90, a chance encounter with the composer shows why his genre-hopping music holds such enduring appeal.

Richard Dawkins’s bestseller defined New Atheism, an intellectual fashion whose conclusions look increasingly irrelevant.

The socialite and civil servant was a devoted assistant to three very different foreign secretaries during the Second World War and its aftermath.

Grossman’s wartime reporting offers a searing account of the depths to which mankind fell in the middle of the last century.

Drug trafficking, money laundering and a compliant regime have sustained Hezbollah's presence in Venezuela for two decades. Since Maduro's fall, that haven is no longer secure.

In capturing the threads of shared culture and profound differences among a far-flung people, the photojournalist Ergun Çağatay shed light on what it means to be Turkic.

During the Second World War, Britain learnt that a propaganda campaign can only be won with accurate and credible reporting.

From the crude wines of the ancient world to the refined commercial product of the 21st century, the story of wine has always been intimately bound with that of human civilisation.

At a time when the United States is retrenching its military commitments in East Asia, Seoul and Tokyo must learn to compete for Washington's support within a rebalanced alliance system.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Daron Acemoglu’s call for a ‘working-class liberalism’ fails to address the underlying cause of liberal democracy’s woes: a lack of productivity.

The Irish-born Whig's time as envoy formed his view of Denmark as a lost cause, but a cautionary tale for the English: of how a country descends into absolutism.

Historian James M. Scott describes America’s bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in harrowing detail, while highlighting Japan’s obduracy, even when faced with the prospect of total annihilation.

The EI Podcast brings you weekly conversations and audio essays from leading writers, thinkers and historians. Hosted by Alastair Benn and Paul Lay. Find the EI Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or ...

Finland's Winter War has become a national legend, while the Baltic states' surrender to Stalin in 1940 is remembered as a humiliation. But the story of Baltic submission is a myth.

Fifty years on, 'I, Claudius' remains a startling account of power, lust and statecraft.

John Coltrane was a spiritual searcher whose shimmering, joyful music pushed jazz to its limits.

Small modular reactors (SMRs) were first conceived for military use and deployed on polar bases. Seventy years on, their record remains dismal.

The Mecca Agreement could work as part of a web of narrower, overlapping alliances better suited to the region than any grand alliance.

The only anti-war party was struck off the ballot and online votes were counted by mysterious means. In Russia's latest exercise in democracy, the ruling party's landslide was never in doubt.

Simon Sebag Montefiore's wildly ambitious history of the region since 1900 is a richly illustrated guide to the law of unintended consequences.

Simon Sebag Montefiore's wildly ambitious history of the region since 1900 is a richly illustrated guide to the law of unintended consequences.

For Proust, serious art assumes its audience can acquire capacities it does not yet possess.

Transcendentalism, the visionary philosophy championed by figures such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, is the yin of the American Revolution.

Opera in Verona's ancient amphitheatre, open to the night sky, is a spectacle to be savoured.

The once-dominant centre-left party has just recorded its worst result in more than a century, but its relative endurance owes much to a pragmatic accommodation with markets.

The physicist Carlo Rovelli has written one book to make you feel better, and another to make you feel much worse.

The EI Podcast brings you weekly conversations and audio essays from leading writers, thinkers and historians. Hosted by Alastair Benn and Paul Lay. Find the EI Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or ...

The new series of 'Fauda', whose cast and crew were caught up in 7 October and its aftermath, is a powerful elegy for the victims of the massacre.

The story of a KGB officer who fled revolutionary Tehran for Britain shows how misjudgements in Moscow, London and Washington deepened the Islamic Republic's suspicion of foreign powers.

The conventional narrative assumes economies can grow while using less energy. The opposite is happening. It is time for climate realism.