Of all the dominant actors on the mid-19th-century scene, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte was the most charismatic and divisive. Admittedly he had nothing of that physique du rôle which a nation ...

The facts about Douglas Mawson are more or less these. He was an intrepid Australian who ventured across Antarctica in the southern summer of 1912–13. His three-strong team suffered an appalling ...

Every so often, a book comes along that is so brilliant, it gives you goosebumps. So it was with Prep, Curtis Sittenfeld’s first novel. It told the story of Lee Fiora, a lower-middle-class girl from ...

Do you know what happened in Lyon in AD 177? Or in Milan in 1300? Or in Baroda in 1825? You probably don’t, but you shouldn’t worry: few do. Whatever happened, it was, by ordinary standards, something ...

It is a question thousands of examinees have had to answer over the centuries: what was the cause of the English Civil War? Marxists, rewriting history with their customary abandon, depict it in ...

What is it about the experience of whites in Rhodesia that readers and publishers find so fascinating? Peter Godwin led the field with his memoir Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa. Then came Alexandra ...

The death of Isabella de’ Medici, favourite daughter of Cosimo, Grand Duke of Tuscany, was as squalid as her life had been glittering. She was strangled in a particularly unpleasant and elaborate way ...

Time was when, if I revealed I taught the poetry of Wordsworth, people would sidle furtively up to me and ask whether I thought the great man slept with his own sister. The correct answer is yes. Two ...

WE CANNOT STOP talking about Sylvia Plath. Or rather, talking about Sylvia Plath has become a way of talking about other issues - issues which are unrelated to her poems themselves, issues which are ...

Back in the early 1980s, in the depths of an Oxford winter, I remember trudging through the snow to attend something called the New College Fiction Symposium – a kind of brains trust featuring ...

David Bentley Hart is an Eastern Orthodox theologian who has made waves in his own sphere through his radical atavism (he refers often to the early Church fathers’ concept of the divine), his sympathy ...

Bob Dylan has been ducking, weaving and obfuscating for so long – been the repository of so many people’s fantasies and theories – that it’s well nigh impossible now to tell where the truth about his ...