Eve Mayes returns to her Year Abroad column to educate us on some of the myths and truths that dominate Kazakh culture and identity.

With a welcome deviation from traditional Renaissance focus, Camilla Allibone celebrates Battiferra’s transcendence. In terms of the female image, she analyses her portrait as literal art and as a symbolical vector.

‘Tongue Tied’ is a short tour through Europe via some of its most at-risk languages. In a series of four articles, Columnist Kieran McGreevy will examine four languages from across the corners of Europe, with the aim of showing what has led these languages to the brink of extinction (and sometimes back), by untying the history of the people, the linguistics of the language itself, and the efforts being made to keep these tongues alive. In the last instalment, Kieran looks at Ume Sámi, a descendent of Uralic language used along the north of Sweden, and how it differs from Scandinavian languages.

Columnist Pippa Mentzel explores the brilliant and bizarre linguistic phenomena of idioms to uncover what they show us about our cultural heritage and how our imaginative human mind revels in describing the world around us. In the first instalment, Pippa talks us through the origins of ‘turning a new leaf’ and discusses a new way to ask after others.