This collection of poetry, prose and political dialectic is directed against the Western idea of childhood. What most of us regard as an early stage in life is represented here as a synthetic creation ...

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

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 ...

For most people the ballad possesses an aura of quaintness, of temporal and social remoteness that invites either patronising academic dissection or folksy sentimentality. This aura Alan Bold aims to ...

For both Russia and the West, Dmitri Shostakovich was the great Soviet composer. Born a year after the 1905 revolution, professionally trained after the Bolshevik takeover, he was the recipient of ...

A surprising number of young would-be reviewers chose to write about adult books, and all of them seemed at pains to imitate an adult style of reviewing, not realising that authentic grandness of ...

In the long history of Western culture, it is given to very few to have an entire era named after them. Socrates sits within Antiquity, Leonardo da Vinci within the Renaissance; even Shakespeare has ...

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 ...

In the Penguin translation of Catullus two words are left untranslated. ‘Pedicabo et irrumabo vos’, writes the poet of his foes Furius and Aurelius and ‘pedicabo et irrumabo vos’ is how it stays in ...

What is the best way to begin a book? Anna Burns, in her third novel, has gone for the now-read-on approach: ‘The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to ...

Western Europe is in the grip of a cultural illness that is sapping its will to live, claims Douglas Murray in this hard-hitting polemic. Unprecedented levels of immigration, especially from the ...

This is a truly excellent book, one of the best it has been my pleasure to read in the line of duty for years. Joanne Harris achieves everything a novelist should aim for, with no sense of effort or ...