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Zbigniew Brzezinski was one of the key figures who helped bring about the demise of the Soviet Union. As National Security Advisor to Jimmy Carter, and counsel to presidents from John F. Kennedy onwards, Brzezinski converted his role as a leading American Sovietologist onto the global stage. George Kennan and Henry Kissinger are often held up as America’s most influential Cold War strategists but Brzezinski’s impact on helping bring about the end of the USSR was greater.

An anthology of essays and reviews by the eminent art historian and writer, Edward Lucie-Smith. The articles cover a broad span, from the Italian Renaissance of Giotto and Antonello da Messina, Leonardo, and Michelangelo, progressing to Rubens, Velázquez, and Ingres, with essays on William Hogarth, John Constable, and John Everett Millais for British art. With the experience of his landmark publications on modern art, which remain in print, the author sweeps the listener on a fabulous journey of perception.

From the capture of Sidney Reilly, the "Ace of Spies", by Lenin's Bolsheviks in 1925, to the deportation from the USA of Anna Chapman, the "Redhead under the Bed", in 2010, Kremlin and Western spymasters have battled for supremacy for nearly a century. In Deception Edward Lucas uncovers the real story of Chapman and her colleagues in Britain and America, unveiling their clandestine missions and the spy-hunt that led to their downfall. It reveals unknown triumphs and disasters of Western intelligence in the Cold War,

There are three things that we have to take into account when attempting to assess the impact of the contemporary sensibility in art on the culture of the various countries bordering the Mediterranean. First, the way in which each of these territories responds to the idea of the contemporary is bound up with its own cultural history. Every Mediterranean coastline possesses a hinterland, and this hinterland exercises an enormous influence on what is seen on the coast itself.

In The Retreat of Western Liberalism, Luce makes a larger statement about the weakening of western hegemony and the crisis of democratic liberalism - of which Donald Trump and his European counterparts are not the cause, but a symptom. Luce argues that we are on a menacing trajectory brought about by ignorance of what it took to build the West, arrogance towards society's losers, and complacency about our system's durability - attitudes that have been emerging since the fall of the Berlin Wall, treated by the West as an absolute triumph over the East.

A good art collection is always much more than the sum of its parts. This applies with especial force to collections of contemporary work. A collection of this kind, whether the collector intends it to be so or not, is always a portrait - a reflection in the mirror of a particular epoch, and, willy-nilly, a self-portrait of the person who takes the trouble to bring it together.

One of the commonest and most loosely used terms in any discussion of contemporary art is the word avant-garde. Indeed it often seems to be taken for granted that valid contemporary art and avant-garde art are synonymous.

The word avant-garde, so much used in connection with the various manifestations of contemporary art, is starting to have a strange, ironic ring to it. One might even claim that it is starting to signify what is behind the times, rather than in front of them. Like all such terms, it is in fact a metaphor, rather than a direct description. Borrowed from old-fashioned military terminology, it seeks to describe a situation where social norms are being perpetually challenged by artists. In the military sphere, where it originated, it is long out of use.

From the earliest times, human beings have found it difficult to represent their own bodies in a straightforward way. The rare painted images of humans in Paleolithic art are much less naturalistic than the images of animals created at the same epoch. At the dawn of art, representations of the nude body were simply vehicles for statement about the need for fertility if the human race was to survive successfully.

Edward Luce's in-depth analysis of the decline of democracy, The Retreat of Western Liberalism, explores the myriad factors affecting the shift away from a political system many readers will have taken for granted in their lifetimes. This Sumoreads summary and analysis offers supplementary material to The Retreat of Western Liberalism to help you distill the key takeaways and review the book's content.

Wifredo Lam is by far the most celebrated, and most people would say the greatest, artist produced by the Caribbean region in modern times. His relationship with where he came from is, however, extraordinarily complex - much more complex than most of his admirers suppose, largely because they usually have no direct experience of the region and little knowledge of its social history.

London is now a major centre for the international art world. The only other European city that houses as many studios is not Paris but Berlin. And Berlin does not have nearly as many galleries, public or commercial, which feature the latest developments in contemporary art.

The first thing to be said about the new exhibition at the British Museum, Defining Beauty: The Body in Ancient Greek Art, is that it is genuinely spectacular and deserves the hosannas it has already been greeted with in the press. The second thing is that it is highly political. It is political in all sorts of ways. The most obvious of these can be found in the fact that it plucks a number of the so-called "Elgin marbles".

The current agitation about the restitution of artistic treasures of all kinds to their original locations is usually presented as overdue justice for faults committed by European colonialism. In fact, this is a serious oversimplification. Conquering armies have always regarded works of art as legitimate spoil. Modern attitudes to the legitimate or illegitimate possession of famous artworks can be traced to the European Enlightenment that blossomed in the late 18th century.

The British Museum has two quite different archaeological exhibitions on view at the moment. In some ways, they echo one another. In other ways, they are quite strongly contrasted. The strongest link, of course is that they are about the archaeology of the Mediterranean, and that in addition, they both have ties to the classical Greek and Roman world that is still the main taproot of Western civilization.

Yayoi Kusama is now one of Japan’s best-known contemporary artists. She was the recipient of her country’s Praemium Imperiale for painting in 2006 - the most prestigious award Japan can offer to any painter, native or foreign. Her rise to fame has been unconventional, even by the standards of the art world of the 21st century, where eccentricities of all kinds pass without question.

'AIDS art' is essentially an American invention. It has now manifested itself in a large number of different locations, but is almost invariably based on a model of artistic activity that evolved in the United States - one that was a response to the impact made by the epidemic on sections of American society.

The Titian Show at the National Gallery here in London has just opened to the public again. It was available for just three days before the big lockdown. Now, it is with us once more, though on rather different terms from what was the case previously. You have to book a time. You have to be wearing a mask. You have to maintain distance between yourself and other visitors booked in for the same slot. Is it worth the hassle? Yes, of course it is. Titian is one of the greatest figures in the history of Western art.

An essay by Edward Lucie-Smith considers the Andy Warhol exhibition re-opening at Tate Modern on July 27. He puts forward a provocative view of the relevance of the art in an time of turbulent disruption. When the Warhol show returns to Tate Modern on July 27, almost the first thing you’ll meet if you go to see it will be a large painting, on two paired canvases, entitled Marilyn Diptych. It features repeated images the film star Marilyn Monroe.

A study of Aubrey Beardsley's work exhibited at Tate Britain until May 25, 2020. The author considers the darkly vigorous imagery of the short lived genius, his graphic work for the notorious Yellow Book, and sublimely erotic illustrations for Lysistrata by Aristophane and Salome by Oscar Wilde, which frank imagery even shocked the author.