History is made up of what continues within us; it reminds us of what we did not live, or imagines what we have lived, which consequently becomes even more ours. The great historian Fernand Braudel, in one of his Écrits sur l’histoire, states that great political and social upheavals urge us to think or rethink the Universe.

In this ‘Book of Hours’, the renowned South Korean pianist Yeol Eum Son speaks of the present and the past in a gesture that joins the world through the musicians that come together to perform. The pandemic traverses this diary as a reminder of the risk it presents to our lives. The concert that the artist cancelled at the last minute is a symbol of frustrated disappointment that she hopes to transform into the joy of hope – the hope that live music, currently silenced, will be heard again one day.

The Italian philosopher Donatella Di Cesare, author, among other works, of The Time of Revolt, travelled to Portugal in 1975 to witness the ongoing revolution that had had a major impact in Italy. Almost half a century later, she now gives her account of that ‘revolutionary holiday’.

Two conflicting views on Universal Basic Income inaugurate a section committed to embrace opposition and ideological debates.In recent years, the idea of allocating a general basic income to all citizens has been the subject of an intense and widespread public discussion; positions for and against the UBI have traversed the Right and the Left taunting their  established boundaries.

Nathalie Quintane and Olivia Rosenthal are both leading lights of the French literary and artistic scenes. Both were asked to interpret or comment on a phrase by Virginia Woolf that establishes a relationship between the female condition and access to the writing ‘profession’ in tangible terms. The resulting essays affirm Woolf’s relevance in the world we live in today.

* A paper delivered by Virginia Woolf to the Women's Service League, 1932

The modern obsession with the stages of life has not only produced ‘youth’, with its representations and its myths, but also old age. This article deals with a movie of life, very much to the taste of totalitarianisms, writes José Bragança de Miranda, with a critical eye trained to decipher the hieroglyphs of the present and its manifestations.

There are books that invite us to take in the currentness of their astute observation and daring imagination — an actuality based on a sound foundation of clarity and the cornerstone of foresight. And we know that this actuality, which is so surprising yet so charming to us, does not exist by chance, luck or accident. It is a form of shrewd, creative intelligence that comes closer to the truth, all the while stealing from ensuing times, so as to be more itself in what has not yet been but is beginning to be.

This architect and researcher at the Faculty of Architecture at Universidade do Porto believes that the huge effects of tourism on contemporary cities can be measured with the instruments of a critical theory of political economy to reveal the image and logic of the neoliberal city.

The city centre faces a time of accelerated transformations and sudden ruptures. The geographer Álvaro Domingues reflects on the subject, against the backdrop of a long-standing politics/city binomial.

Rio de Janeiro, the wonderful city, as it is called, has been revisited in its past and present by the pianist Gilda Oswaldo Cruz, who was born there and lived there for many years. The stunning natural surroundings between the sea and the hills, the violent social contrasts, and life in the favelas (slums) have all contributed to the effervescence of the city’s popular culture, of which samba and the Carnival are the most outstanding manifestations.