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 ...

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 ...

Few people produce a new book in their hundredth year; fewer still at that age produce a book containing original ideas. But if anyone was going to do it, it surely had to be James Lovelock. He has ...

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 ...

The Byzantine Empire has never had a good press, but few things in its long history have given rise to more controversy than its relations with the crusades. The First Crusade is an epic story, on a ...

Charles II has come down in history as a swashbuckling gallant who bedded every pretty lady who caught his fancy. According to this revealing and entertaining biography, by one of Nell Gwyn’s direct ...

Some of us find it remarkably difficult simply to go for a walk. We need an excuse, a project, a literary precedent. We don’t want our wanderings, or our accounts of them, to be simply strolls in the ...

In Harold Bloom’s native United States, his latest tome has proved something of a publishing phenomenon. When I visited New York last autumn, this academic panorama of Shakespeare was enjoying a ...

It is remarkable that, in the huge tide of material written on Hitler’s Third Reich over the past half-century, there has not been a single-volume history of the Reich’s economy in English (though ...

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 ...

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 ...