We all know the true story of how Father Christmas came to be. It was the work of Siberian shamans high on ...

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.

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, ...

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 ...

There are plenty of Vietnam memoirs and films but surprisingly few novels about the war, and none of them could be called exceptional or definitive. In his first full-length novel for nine years, ...

'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.' ...

Richard Aldington's translation of Laclos' novel first saw the light of day in 1924. It's hard to see why it should appear again now, without apology, under the imprint of the Open University. English ...

According to the Knights Hospitallers’ own foundation legend, their origins went back to a time before the Crusades and even before Christ. They held that their original hospital in Jerusalem had been ...

Robin Hanbury-Tenison’s Oxford Book of Exploration, originally published in hardback in 1993, was the very first anthology of explorers’ writings. There are, of course, a great many travel anthologies ...

Recently discovered in the vast collection of the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Thomas Hammond’s memoir is an important find. Most 18th-century memoirs were written by members of the ...

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 JEROME SISTERS were the first wave of American beauties to marry into the British aristocracy, the precursors of a tide of 'Dollar Princesses' eager to swap cash for titles. Unlike their ...