There is something magnificent about the ambition of Iain McGilchrist’s book. It offers nothing less than an account of human nature and Western civilisation as outcomes of the competition between the ...

For a computer programmer, or indeed anyone at all, Ada Lovelace had the oddest start in life. She was the only legitimate child of Lord Byron and hence should have been the female incarnation of ...

Stephen Greenblatt’s ardent and involving new book is concerned with rulers and aspirants in Shakespeare who abuse their power. It draws attention to a very wide range of characters. There are the out ...

Swedish journalist Jonas Jonasson’s second novel, The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden, hurtles along with all the energy, pace and improbability of his first, The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed ...

Allen Lane, the man who founded Penguin Books and made of it a national institution, rarely talked about himself, but when he did it was to the point: ‘I have got a little barrier around myself that I ...

Bisbee was built precariously into the steep sided canyons near the Mexican border. Copper was first discovered there in 1877, and the town was named in honour of Judge De-Witt Bisbee, partowner of ...

bloom on her upturned finger tips. Only a selection of our reviews and articles are free. Subscribers receive the monthly magazine and access to all articles on our website. Following its ...

Only a selection of our reviews and articles are free. Subscribers receive the monthly magazine and access to all articles on our website. Following its controversy-courting adaptation for the big ...

'Half a grain of morphine sulphate, a massive dose, was injected into the sick man by Dr Milton Feltenstein in the Chelsea Hotel, New York. The patient was suffering from actue confusional psychosis.' ...

Emma Tennant's new novel is a crisply written magical mystery tour of childhood, the 'north' of the country becoming a metaphor for an ancestral sphere which is feud-ridden, sour, resistant to the new ...

‘The present is more and more the day of the hotel,’ declared Henry James in The American Scene. It still is. We are all hoteliers now, at least potentially. The private two-bed flat competes for ...

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 ...