This is partly because Chabal – a historian of France and the son of a Moroccan-born historian of the Lusophone world – is ...

Prime Minister Burnham’s brush with investors in gilts was short and sour. He argued that Britain needed to stop being ‘in ...

Waiting for Permission - Deep into the Sixties: Britain 1965–66 by David Kynaston ...

Every now and then, a serious scholar wins the lottery. An academic journal publishes their research and the article crosses ...

At one point in Defining Hitler its author asks the reader the rhetorical question: why bother to read this book? For many writers this would be a merited act of authorial self-destruction. In Haffner ...

Montefiore refuses to treat the Middle East as an exclusively Arab or Muslim arena. Turks, Persians, Jews, Kurds, Armenians, ...

If I say that I used to be very afraid of Enoch Powell, I think a certain proportion of Literary Review readers will guess what I mean. To be a socialist in the 1960s was to know that, even as the ...

Debussy once asked Mallarme if he could set one of his poems to music. But, replied Mallarme, have I not already set it to music? Hilary Mantel has decided to treat the French Revolution as a novel.

James Meek likes to use major historical or political events as backgrounds to his fiction. In his most celebrated novel, The People’s Act of Love (2005), the action takes place in the aftermath of ...

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 ...

‘Each country has the government it deserves,’ the Savoyard writer Joseph de Maistre observed in 1811. Whether or not the French really deserved Napoleon is an interesting question, yet the remark is ...

I once spent the night in a very small Wyoming town at the base of the Big Horn Mountains called Ten Sleep (pop 311). At the local diner I asked the young waitress about social life in Ten Sleep.