In 1898, Asher Wertheimer, a leading London art dealer, marked his silver wedding anniversary by commissioning John Singer Sargent to paint two portraits, one of himself and one of his wife. Sargent went on to paint all ten of the Wertheimers’ sons and daughters, and became a close friend of the family. Asher Wertheimer would eventually bequeath nine of the ten portraits to the National Gallery with the request that they should be displayed together, which they were amid controversy in 1923.

For some people, writing in a language other than their mother tongue presents an obvious advantage. No longer constrained by their usual grammatical and lexical norms, they unconsciously import turns of phrase, sometimes expressing them literally, and sometimes conveying them approximately, thereby creating an original voice.

In 1967, the American ecologist-turned-psychologist John Calhoun was approaching fifty. His novel population studies of rats had brought him to international attention, in large part because the public was convinced – as was he – that his rats had something to say about the human future. Rats, Calhoun discovered, were creatures with sensitivities and sensibilities.

Just when we thought the excellent biographies of the great Italian author and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi had uncovered all there was to be known of his internment in Auschwitz in 1943, a new one appears. This time it is not of Levi himself, however, but of a man who smuggled food, clothing and letters into the camp where he worked, and who risked his own non-Jewish life to keep Levi alive.

Since the announcement of a ceasefire in Gaza, much of the world has focused on the immediate impacts of destruction in the strip. The discussion has been focused on which bodies will administer aid, how reconstruction might start, the role of international actors and the terms of the fragile ceasefire.

In the early 1990s a Catholic deacon called Yvon Bertorello was sent to train for four years at the Minerva, a college run by the Vatican to prepare its top priests for overseas postings.

Scholars are difficult subjects for the biographer, since they spend – or fantasize about spending – most of their time at their desks. Jacob Grimm was a particularly reclusive character; his more outward-going brother Wilhelm was often debilitated by ill health. Yet the two produced a prodigious body of work, of which the famous Tales are only a tiny fragment.

Los Angeles is burning in the middle of winter. The fires are still not fully contained, and the Santa Ana winds fuelling them returned this week. Over 40,000 acres have been burned, 200,000 people have been evacuated, more than 12,000 homes and buildings have been destroyed and more than 27 people dead, with many more missing. This is just one city.

In “Ignorance and Bliss,” Mark Lilla, a professor of humanities at Columbia University, suggests that our passionate quest for knowledge is inextricable from our anxious retreat from ignorance. We want to both know and not know—and “playing hide-and-seek with ourselves can become a perilous game.”

Weimar, the short-lived German republic preceding the Third Reich, has always provided a convenient broadside for conservatives of every stripe. It stands as a parable of reckless effulgence, the image of a society unaware of its own need for order and state power and so doomed to be visited by state power in its most vengeful and cruel form.