Australian war artist George Washington Lambert wanted the fallen to be remembered as they were in life. In Gallipoli's waste land he found, springing out of the ground, the perfect symbols of youth and sacrifice, of death and renewal, of the squalor and the glory of war and the debt owed to nature

The Austrian expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka, having volunteered for active […]

I have absolutely no idea how cultural institutions can carry out their traditional missions as repositories of our collective heritage amid calls to “decolonize” the collections, stacks, and curricula of museums, libraries, and universities mount, and as even the most anodyne monuments are systematically toppled

The landscapes of the past are dotted with lazarettos, pesthouses, plague houses and plague pits for the rapid disposal of victims. As millions have languished in home quarantine, this century's fever sheds, it is just possible we are shedding the fever of modernism that left us so unexpectedly vulnerable to the return of history

Grievous though the plagues, wars and pestilence of the past most certainly were, never were they permitted to harm the common weal in such a way as to purge what Lewis termed 'sensible and human things' from public and private life in the manner we are experiencing today

If you were to unfurl the tattered skein of human […]

As a key symbol of China's 'century of humiliation', the plundered and tumbled stones of the Yuanmingyuan lend their everlasting significance to hard-line policies towards Tibetans, Uighurs, Hong Kongers and other groups perceived as threatening hard-won national cohesion

Like the legendary lost treasure of popular imagination, it is to be hoped that somewhere beneath the Ukraine's history of subjugation and corruption a better future remains more than a myth, awaiting the day when the nation is genuinely independent and can take its rightful place as an equal member in the concert of nations.

The true auto-da-fé, the true 'act of faith', involves passing through the fire to emerge stronger and wiser. Thus it was for those consigned to Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace and, in Paris, the Rev. Jean-Marc Fournier's rescue of the Crown of Thorns from the flames Notre Dame