Some of the most colourful passages of Greek and Latin literature describe the people of Gaul. There are haughty, bellicose Gauls, drunk Gauls, Gauls who sleep on straw like animals, Gauls who make ...

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 ...

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.

Once you unstop your ears to its music, the siren song of the American road is hard to resist. I made my first coast-to-coast drive at the age of nineteen, setting out with a friend in my battered ...

Taller with the Charm On - The People’s Emperor: The Unlikely Rise and Spectacular Fall of Napoleon III by Edward Shawcross ...

For many, what would come to be known as Christianity was still a Jewish sect operating within the confines of the established Law (ie the teachings of the Torah). Yet Christianity was cosmopolitan ...

Reports from Cuba by J S Tennant ...

That episode is pivotal in Liaquat Ahamed’s panorama of the origins of an era of deflation, stagnation and unrest – the ‘first Great Depression’ – that afflicted much of the world for the rest of the ...

Six of the Best - The Nord Stream Conspiracy: The Inside Story of the Explosions that Shook the World by Bojan Pancevski ...

The Partisan Life of Abraham Lincoln by Matthew Pinsker ...

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 ...

Ulrikka S Gernes’s debut novel, A Girl Left the Room, was published to huge acclaim in Denmark in 2024. It begins with a moth trapped in a train carriage. The protagonist, Tanja, captures it tenderly ...