The Times Literary Supplement

In one of his “Notes on Militant Poetics” (2012–13), the British poet Sean Bonney comments on the transformation of Satan and the devils into snakes in book ten of

Welcome to Darkenbloom, a town in Austria's easternmost and least attractive province, on the border with Hungary. A town whose castle burnt down in 1946, whose count fled and whose tourist offerings amount to a crumbling plague column and a damaged altarpiece featuring small, feathered devils. A town where walls have ears and flowers have eyes; whose locals know all about each other, but who know nothing at all about each other, or about the past. Or so those shade-loving plants, the Darkenbloomers, claim.

Peter Marshall In Storm's Edge , Peter Marshall's new portrait of Orkney, the islands where he was born and raised, the historian concentrates

The Weimar Republic, founded after the revolution that overthrew the Kaiser in 1918 and destroyed fifteen years later by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, still seems to many to offer the paradigm for the failure of democracy. The search for reasons why it gave way to the most notorious dictatorship of modern times – militaristic, totalitarian, racist, genocidal – has led to a concentration on its weaknesses and in some cases a feeling that its demise was inevitable. The roots of German political culture were simply too shallow for it to weather the storm of economic crisis, international isolation and populist mobilization. At the same time it has been viewed by many historians as worth studying in its own right, not just as an antechamber to the Third Reich.

Should Germany look east or west? Is the nation's destiny to become a European Germany or to lead a German Europe? Thomas Mann's contribution to these debates was seminal.

In Brussels, the Baudouin Tower sits on a corner in the business district. The building is heavy, boxy, boring, of a piece with the many piles of glass and steel in the neighbourhood. Yet inside this nondescript structure is the headquarters of one of the most important – and little-known – institutions in the global financial system. Euroclear provides services that rarely attract attention, but without which the system would collapse. It helps to settle a mind-boggling €1,000 trillion in financial transactions each year, and it holds €40 trillion worth of assets in custody for clients.

The Egyptian poet Joyce Mansour was a leading member of the surrealist group around André Breton. An exile living in Paris, she often made a myth of her life. “I was born in 1928”, she once declared, “at the far end of ancient Greece.” She said her parents were first cousins – a claim that later biographers refuted – but the frisson of incest suited her. She wore heavy kohl and, a family member recalled, left “in her wake an intoxicating smell of jasmine” perfume. After an interview a French journalist said Mansour didn't want to talk about Egypt, or Breton, or surrealism, which she described curtly as “simply a way of seeing things”. “It considerably reduces conversation”, he complained. When she died, at the age of fifty-eight, she left behind her papers “pell-mell” in the empty boxes of the Montecristo cigars she liked to smoke.

Veroniki Dalakoura (b.1952) first came to the notice of her translator, John Taylor, after their mutual friend Elias Petropoulos alerted him to her work. It is easy to see how Petropoulos, bard of the rebetiko music of the Greek underworld, might have been drawn to Dalakoura's shameless, fearless erotic voice and irreverent deconstruction of poetic conventions. Rather than extending imagery, she transitions between fragments of images that remain unresolved, often in the context of amatory encounters (with men, women and beasts alike), in poetry, prose poetry and sometimes combinations of both. “The dog, his penis slightly erect, his tongue ever among the roots of my hair, drenched my entire face with saliva”, she writes in “Amor Omnia”.

This week, Mary Beard squares up to the gorefest of Gladiator II and Alan Hollinghurst in conversation at the Cambridge Literary Festival.

Graphic posters denouncing abortion, new legislation decriminalizing battery in the home, laws banning “homosexual propaganda”, violent attacks on gay rights activists – all this is part of the aggressive social conservatism that has characterized Vladimir Putin's Russia. In 2012, a businessman told the journalist Lucy Ash that “it took us 70 years to get rid of Communism but thank God we got rid of this Liberalism much faster – it has only taken two decades”. For years attacks on Ukrainian sovereignty had been justified by invoking the threat of western “decadence”. But since February 2022 the linking of Russian nationalism and “traditional values” has only deepened, not least because of the demographic crisis that war is producing due to deaths on the battlefield and waves of emigration. Last year Putin urged women to have at least seven or eight children.