Felipe Fernandezarmesto

The Amazon can drive you mad. In Werner Herzog’s cult movie Aguirre: Wrath of God, Klaus Kinski affected a crazed stare that bordered on self-caricature. But the real-life explorer he portrayed was a first-class, unquestionable, copper-bottomed maniac, who systematically murdered his companions, as they drifted downriver in torrid, febrile paranoia in 1560. He recast himself

‘The Age of Russia,’ according to the doom-fraught speculations Oswald Spengler published in 1918, would succeed ‘the Decline of the West’. For a while, it looked as if he was right. Russia’s non-western credentials became part of the rhetoric of Soviet foreign policy. Hailed as ‘the future which works’, Russia was earnestly copied by escapers