John Adamson: 1688 and All That - The Last Invasion of England: 1688 and the Dutch Armada by Arthur der Weduwen ...

Perhaps the most revealing Roy Cohn anecdote in this extraordinary book concerns the time, in 1955, when the infamous lawyer took Barbara Walters out on a first date. Cohn picked up the TV star in his ...

Tudor history buffs and attentive readers of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy will recognise the name William Paget. Others will require some words of introduction. Paget (1505/6–63) was an able and ...

In 2014 he wrote Napoleon the Great, which made the case for bracketing his subject with Alexander, Peter and Frederick. That was a full biography which portrayed Napoleon in action, both on the ...

After all, haven’t the core functions of the modern state – policing criminals, settling disputes, managing currency, creating corporations, facilitating inheritances – operated quite clearly for the ...

All the Write Stuff - A History of the Novel in Britain by Philip Hensher ...

Like the much-mythologised Wild West, the Debatable Land was terra nullius, where the writ of law was by and large ignored and bad men roamed at will. Situated where the northwest of England meets the ...

At one point in Defining Hitler its author asks the reader the rhetorical question: why bother to read this book? For many writers this would be a merited act of authorial self-destruction. In Haffner ...

In January 1937, the mutilated – no, butchered – body of Pamela Werner, a pretty, somewhat naive girl from Britain, was found in Peking, not far from the ice rink where she had been skating and the ...

If I say that I used to be very afraid of Enoch Powell, I think a certain proportion of Literary Review readers will guess what I mean. To be a socialist in the 1960s was to know that, even as the ...

In his preface, John Julius Norwich, author of two fine histories of the Normans in Sicily, writes: ‘The Strait of Messina is only a couple of miles across and the island is politically part of Italy; ...

Bob Dylan has been ducking, weaving and obfuscating for so long – been the repository of so many people’s fantasies and theories – that it’s well nigh impossible now to tell where the truth about his ...