When the American journalist Suzy Hansen first arrived in Istanbul in 2007 on a research trip for an NGO, the promise of a ...

This is the singular and spectacular trajectory of George Forster, subject of Andrea Wulf’s irresistible new biography.

More than this, he sees the assaults of the 1980s as intensely damaging not only to Oxbridge, but to British culture more ...

Lytton, daughter of the Earl of Lytton, accepted a proposal of marriage from the rising Conservative politician Gerald ...

Her extreme reserve seemed impenetrable, yet she was intensely loveable … one of her rare expressive looks was something to ...

Bookbindings: An Illustrated History is full of beautiful images of bookbindings from the beginnings of the codex right up to the present day. The volume’s beauty is matched by David Pearson’s ...

Readers hoping for an easy time will be alarmed by the first page of Missouri Williams’s new novel. The Vivisectors opens with its narrator, Agathe, musing on how a story can be ‘disguised’ to evade ...

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In the autumn of 1988, the Independent magazine sent me to Estonia to report on the Kremlin’s waning power in the Soviet Baltic. Alexander Chancellor, the editor, sensed that the USSR was in trouble: ...

The Spinster Cookbook is not so much a guide to dishes to cook – the first recipe appears on page 77 and it is basically toast – as an exhortation to live the good life in a kitchen of one’s own. If ...

Early on in Ana Kinsella’s debut novel, one of the principals, John Reddan, asks the other, Frida Slattery, ‘What are you looking for?’ Frida replies, ‘The statue of Mary. There’s always one. Haven’t ...