A recent documentary, “The Desert of Forbidden Art”, tells of a cultural and social phenomenon hidden in the deserts of Uzbekistan. The museum has miraculously preserved rich collections of Soviet avant-garde art, but will it be able to survive under new – completely different, but no less threatening – conditions? The film also illuminates the relationship between the state and the individual, writes Masha Karp

Bill Bowring is well known to anybody interested in international law, and especially in human rights in Russia. Professor of Law at Birkbeck College and a practising barrister, it was he who in 2002 established the European Human Rights Advocacy Centre, which has since helped many applicants, mainly from Chechnya, to take their cases to the European Court of Human Rights. In 2008 Bowring published his book “The Degradation of the International Legal Order?”. Masha Karp talks to Professor Bowring about this book, about justice in Russia and about the relation between theory and practice in his work.

Arthur Koestler, whose turbulent life charts the intellectual history of the 20thc in the West, has finally found a worthy biographer in Michael Scammell. A youthful communist and survivor of Franco’s prisons, Koestler developed into one of the West’s most persuasive crusaders against communism.