It focuses unashamedly on the high politics of a tumultuous period that began with Rishi Sunak, the first politician of ...

David Goodhart is one of those brave souls with the energy to engage in a perpetual, corrective dialogue with his former comrades on the Left, for nowadays he describes his support for Labour as ...

This exceptional book is billed as garden writing, but it is garden writing only in the sense that Moby-Dick is a treatise on whales. There is no need to have the slightest knowledge of or interest in ...

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 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 nineteenth-century journalist and novelist Harriet Martineau insisted that her letters should never be published, begging the recipients of her correspondence to throw away the incriminating ...

Dramatised in the 1957 film Ill Met by Moonlight, in which Dirk Bogarde rather improbably played the leading role, Patrick Leigh Fermor’s kidnapping of a German general in Crete in the spring of 1944 ...

On an autumn day in 1680, the 50-year-old Charles II charged Samuel Pepys with an unusual task. Over two three-hour sittings, one on a Sunday evening, the next the following Tuesday morning, the king ...

Bob Dylan has been ducking, weaving and obfuscating for so long – been the repository of so many people’s fantasies and theories – that it’s well nigh impossible now to tell where the truth about his ...

At this time of year many readers may be about to holiday in Italy. One indispensable item for the journey is Christopher Duggan’s brilliant and monumental The Force of Destiny, which deserves to be ...

It has done no favours to the modern reputation of King Frederick II of Prussia – ‘Frederick the Great’ – that Hitler, during the mad final days of the Third Reich, placed the monarch’s portrait above ...

How do the Booker judges choose the best book of the year from the sixty or seventy books they are sent? Their number has been increased from three to five, and literary academics have been less ...