"We can begin with a kiss, though this will not turn out to be a love story, at least not a love story of anything like the usual kind". So begins "A Very Queer Family Indeed", which introduces us to the extraordinary Benson family. Edward White Bens...

When Dave Hickey was twelve, he rode the surfer's dream: the perfect wave. And, like so many things in life we long for, it didn't quite turn out – he shot the pier and dashed himself against the rocks of Sunset Cliffs in Ocean Beach, which just abou...

Nili Gold, who was born in Haifa to German-speaking parents in 1948, the first year of Israeli statehood, here offers a remarkable homage to her native city during its heyday as an international port and cultural center. Spanning the 1920s and '30s,...

Imelda Connor is a classic Irish lass – a fiery, red-headed beauty, quick to anger, and fiercely protective of her younger siblings. Growing up on a small farm in the rolling hills of County Cork, she thinks she has her life completely mapped out. He...

On July 15, 2004, twelve women, all in their sixties and seventies, positioned themselves in front of the gates of the Kangla Fort in Manipur, India – the headquarters of the Assam Rifles, a unit of the Indian army. One by one, the women stripped the...

A Czechoslovakian Jew who was imprisoned at Auschwitz, Dina Gottliebova-Babbitt (1923-2009) was saved by her artistic abilities. Gottliebova painted the walls of the children's barracks with images of the Disney film "Snow White and the Seven Dwarves...

This intellectual biography of Hans Kohn (1891-1971) looks at theories of nationalism in the twentieth century as articulated through the life and work of its leading scholar and activist. Hans Kohn was born in late nineteenth-century Prague, but his...

Werner Schroeter was a leading figure of New German Cinema. In more than forty films made between 1967 and 2008, including features, documentaries, and shorts, he ignored conventional narrative, creating instead dense, evocative collages of image and...

Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975) was one of the most important Italian intellectuals of the post-World War II era. An astonishing polymath – poet, novelist, literary critic, political polemicist, screenwriter, and film director – he exerted profound i...

If you were an independent, adventurous, liberated American woman in the 1920s or 1930s where might you have sought escape from the constraints and compromises of bourgeois living? Paris and the Left Bank quickly come to mind. But would you have ever...