Virginia Woolf travelled widely in Britain and Europe throughout her life, but visited Ireland only once. On 27 April 1934, she sailed out from Fishguard to Cork for a motoring tour with her husband Leonard, visiting the novelist Elizabeth Bowen at…

Until the mid-nineteenth century, Japan was a pre-modern state governed by a network of powerful families and warlords led by its Shogun, isolated from the rest of the world. At that point, there was a growing realisation that China and Russia were…