The English love to hate Wallis Simpson. She is vilified as the gold-digging sex goddess who stole our film-star king, Edward VIII. Hugo Vickers has spent a lifetime following Wallis. At the age of ...

Western democracies have been living through a strange period – a suicidal period. An appropriate level of self-criticism long ago morphed into self-distrust, then into a form of self-flagellation. A ...

Do you know what happened in Lyon in AD 177? Or in Milan in 1300? Or in Baroda in 1825? You probably don’t, but you shouldn’t worry: few do. Whatever happened, it was, by ordinary standards, something ...

Ever since Shakespeare labelled Richard, Duke of Gloucester, a ‘murderous Machiavel’, the word ‘Machiavellian’ in popular culture has meant being devious, cunning, scheming and quite prepared for the ...

THE SCOPE OF contemporary US dominance is unparalleled in human history. America has 752 military facilities in 130 countries, some of them until recently part of the Soviet empire. What the American ...

IN HIS THIRTY-FIVE years of life, Paul Nizan was a key intellectual in the French Communist Party. He published three novels, polemical essays, translations and a large quantity of militant journalism ...

Stuart: A Life Backwards is a peculiar book. Billed as the story of ‘an extraordinary friendship between a reclusive writer and illustrator … and a chaotic, knife-wielding beggar’, it is part ...

When the journalist and author Kenneth Rose died aged eighty-nine in 2014, he left 350 boxes containing six million words of his journals. He had kept a journal for seventy years. Rose was keenly ...

In the long history of Western culture, it is given to very few to have an entire era named after them. Socrates sits within Antiquity, Leonardo da Vinci within the Renaissance; even Shakespeare has ...

In 1990 a brown-paper parcel came to light in the strongroom of the solicitors firm Linklaters and Paines in London. It had been deposited there in 1947 and had been addressed to Parr’s Bank, Regent ...

The title of Timothy Snyder’s new book is more cryptic than his unambiguously named Bloodlands, in which he explored the phenomenal violence imposed on the territories between Russia proper and the ...

In Harold Bloom’s native United States, his latest tome has proved something of a publishing phenomenon. When I visited New York last autumn, this academic panorama of Shakespeare was enjoying a ...