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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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.

On 2 and 3 March 1498, the 29-year-old aspirant civil servant Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) was among a crowd that gathered at the Convent of San Marco in Florence to hear a fiery sermon given by ...

‘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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Helen Dunmore knows what goes into the telling of a good story: solid characterisation, a suspenseful plot, and fluent narration. House of Orphans, like her earlier book The Siege, is an historical ...

This book was originally published in 1946, under the title Notre Guerre. It is an astonishing work, almost unbearable to read in places, yet ultimately inspiring. It evokes horror and compels ...

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 ...

The ‘Tyger’ of my title cannot be unfamiliar to the readers of the Literary Review. Prof. Miner, however, needs a brief introduction. He is Professor Paul Miner, a literary scholar, who is reported to ...