Ancient Rome was a culture governed by the spoken word and Cicero was the most articulate public speaker Rome ever produced.

Jacobsen’s hypothetical scenario centres on a genetically modified strain of plague, one of history’s most devastating ...

How the Americas Transformed Renaissance England, Lauren Working observes that these indigenous men may well have been recently captured and brought to London. English colonists were patrolling ...

A Bulbous Moon - The Poems of Sylvia Plath by Amanda Golden & Karen V Kukil (eds) ...

Tatar begins with natural history. The dominant theme is industriousness: spiders work for us day and night. They eat some 400 million tons of insects a year. There are between forty and fifty ...

California Dreaming - The Beverly Hills Housewife: Hockney’s Californian Muse and the World Beyond the Pool by James Cahill ...

Peter Hitchens’s book is a plangent lament for the old Britain, the land of warm beer and lengthening shadows on the village cricket pitch; but it can also be read as an obituary for the old Daily ...

Unexpected discoveries are the stuff of fairy tales: the story of The Turnip Princess’s metamorphosis from dusty manuscript to Penguin Classic is almost one in itself. Franz Xaver von Schönwerth (1810 ...

In 1945 Jean-Paul Sartre was one of France’s most respected left-wing writers and intellectuals. He denounced Céline as a collaborator and anti-Semite and also accused him of having been paid to write ...

On 2 and 3 March 1498, the 29-year-old aspirant civil servant Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) was among a crowd that gathered at the Convent of San Marco in Florence to hear a fiery sermon given by ...

In his superb American Pastoral, Philip Roth displayed signs of wanting to examine his kind of people in greater philosophic depth: Swede Lermontov, a Newark Jew who has moved to the mink-and-manure ...

There have been many books recently featuring the brave little fighter plane that arguably saved Britain from Nazi subjugation – notably the memoirs of Geoffrey Wellum, one of the ever-dwindling 'Few' ...