This is partly because Chabal – a historian of France and the son of a Moroccan-born historian of the Lusophone world – is ...

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 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 ...

Montefiore refuses to treat the Middle East as an exclusively Arab or Muslim arena. Turks, Persians, Jews, Kurds, Armenians, ...

Cicero's life was bookended by two momentous events: the fall of Roman Republic and the rise of the future Augustus. Llewelyn Morgan asks what his letters reveal about this turning point in history.

Prime Minister Burnham’s brush with investors in gilts was short and sour. He argued that Britain needed to stop being ‘in hock to the bond markets’. The gilt market duly responded and yields began to ...

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.

James Meek likes to use major historical or political events as backgrounds to his fiction. In his most celebrated novel, The People’s Act of Love (2005), the action takes place in the aftermath of ...

Waiting for Permission - Deep into the Sixties: Britain 1965–66 by David Kynaston ...

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 ...

‘Each country has the government it deserves,’ the Savoyard writer Joseph de Maistre observed in 1811. Whether or not the French really deserved Napoleon is an interesting question, yet the remark is ...

Every now and then, a serious scholar wins the lottery. An academic journal publishes their research and the article crosses ...