The title of Miranda Seymour’s vastly enjoyable new book is misleading. It suggests that Byron’s wife and daughter tumbled about in the slipstream of a volcanic genius. Yet although there was no ...

Ammonites and Leaping Fish is a title as engaging as I suspect the author, Penelope Lively, to be. Born in Cairo in 1933, she was a typical upper-class English child of those times. Her father was a ...

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 ...

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

Writing to Monica Jones in 1954, Philip Larkin describes his mother, Eva: she is ‘nervy, cowardly, obsessional, boring, grumbling, irritating, self-pitying. It’s no use telling her to alter: you might ...

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 ...

Get ready to start hearing a lot about Martin Luther. On 31 October 2017 it will be five hundred years since Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, ...

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 ...

British public life is sustained by a series of comforting delusions – as became very clear to me during five years writing leaders for a national newspaper, trying to reconcile the stories the ...