« Last night didn’t just feel like an election victory, there was something of 1989 about it, the way people were dancing on the roofs of bus stops, forming a huge conga line that went down to the Danube and back. Going up the metro escalator, shouting ‘Ruszik hasa!’ ‘Russians go home!’ »

Monsieur and Madame Louis Cahen d’Anvers never liked Renoir’s portrait of their eight-year-old daughter; it was Madame Cahen d’Anvers’s lover who chose Renoir over a more fashionable society portraitist; they stuck the picture upstairs in a maid’s room. Later, during the Nazi occupation, it was carted off by Göring. Many years on, when Irène was one of the few members of her ...

Growing up on, and still happily consuming, American popular culture, my brain’s first association when it sees the letters e, p, i and c, is to read epic failure. And I hear the bass rumble of the film trailer while I read that a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I see a shady gangster appearing in a 1950...

We are all explorers.

Last week was Easter weekend. I’m not much of a Christian, but where I’m from (Latviaaaa!) it means family gatherings, eggs dyed with the first spring plants from the garden, and the ritual of cracking them against each other — the strongest shell wins. Maybe some swinging on a swing as high as possible, so the mosquitoes won’t bite all summer...