David Bentley Hart is an Eastern Orthodox theologian who has made waves in his own sphere through his radical atavism (he refers often to the early Church fathers’ concept of the divine), his sympathy ...

AT ONE OF the earliest points of our recorded history, the remarkable culture of Mesopotamia flourished, and one of its many versatile and precocious achievements was Gilgamesh, our first recognisable ...

If you had been in the vicinity of the Turk’s Head Tavern on Soho’s Gerrard Street on a Friday evening in the second half of the 18th century, you might have recognised a number of famous men ...

SALLEY VICKERS IS an audacious writer. who dares to tread where few in this apostate age would wish to venture. At a time when the Church of England is struggling to persuade its dwindling ...

IN JANUARY 1940 the Chef of the Imperial General Staff, General Sir Edmund Ironside, recorded his impressions of the French army after a tour of inspection. In his diary he wrote, ‘I say to myself ...

William Lygon, 7th Earl Beauchamp (1872–1938), was a cabinet minister, a Knight of the Garter and lord steward of the Royal Household. Married to Lettice Grosvenor, sister of Bendor, Duke of ...

The publisher’s hype for Call the Midwife does Jennifer Worth few favours. ‘Appeals to the huge market for nostalgia … Jennifer is a natural-born storyteller. She’ll be perfect for publicity … Misery ...

A straw poll suggests that although most people in this country have a hazy image of who Che Guevara was, they are only likely to have come across him in some combination of the following three ...

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 ...

Sheer bluff, calling a book like this The Critical Heritage. The Critical Detritus would be nearer the mark. Any good writer needs to be read in a new way; it might be argued that the creaks and ...

It isn’t too much of a spoiler, I hope, to say that Robert Harris’s enjoyable new book has a twist not at the end, but at the beginning: it starts out looking like a historical novel and, a chapter or ...

A clue to the dichotomy at the heart of this accessible history of American capitalism is buried deep within it. In describing the growth of the footwear company Nike in the 1970s and 1980s, Bhu ...