Last month, the Vatican opened its archives on Pope Pius XII, the wartime pontiff who has long been suspected of turning a blind eye to the Holocaust and possibly also the postwar ‘exfiltration’ of ...

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 ...

If one goal of modern biography is to lay bare secrets and perversions, then Salvador Dalí must necessarily make a disappointing subject, for he spent a lucrative lifetime laying them all bare himself ...

Only last year, Thomas Friedman, three-times Pulitzer Prize winner and a regular columnist in the New York Times, wrote: ‘One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a ...

I once spent the night in a very small Wyoming town at the base of the Big Horn Mountains called Ten Sleep (pop 311). At the local diner I asked the young waitress about social life in Ten Sleep.

Hot on the heels of his massive Armageddon comes another blockbuster from Max Hastings, this time on the death throes of the predatory Japanese Empire, whose final agonies outlived those of Hitler’s ...

Edward I and his first queen, Eleanor of Castile, were at the sharp end of medieval infant mortality statistics. Eleanor gave birth to at least fourteen children, only to see five of her daughters die ...

‘My supreme idea is to get on’, wrote the young David Lloyd George to his sweetheart, Margaret Owen, during their prolonged courtship. Ominously, he added: ‘I am prepared to thrust even love itself ...

Allen Lane, the man who founded Penguin Books and made of it a national institution, rarely talked about himself, but when he did it was to the point: ‘I have got a little barrier around myself that I ...

That rough beast the Great American Novel has been slouching around since the 19th century in the form of hefty books by male authors, from Melville and Hemingway to Franzen and DeLillo. It’s always ...

There has been a lot of Gainsborough about recently, notably the three exhibitions that ran concurrently in Bath, in Sudbury and at the National Portrait Gallery. If these have been the tip, Hugh ...

The study of the ancient Persians is, as Richard Stoneman rather artfully puts it, a thriving business. So far from ruling over a ‘forgotten empire’, as a British Museum exhibition unhappily described ...