Volume 72 Issue 2 February 2022

Official secrecy and institutional rivalry obscured the achievements of two crash programmes hastily launched to teach Japanese during the Second World War. 

The 19th-century craze for spiritualism ‘resurrected’ the dead through manipulated photographs, a practice that boomed with the trauma caused by war – though it was not without its sceptics.

A hero of Finnish folklore helps his nation find its identity.