Ancient Rome was a culture governed by the spoken word and Cicero was the most articulate public speaker Rome ever produced.

Jacobsen’s hypothetical scenario centres on a genetically modified strain of plague, one of history’s most devastating ...

How the Americas Transformed Renaissance England, Lauren Working observes that these indigenous men may well have been recently captured and brought to London. English colonists were patrolling ...

A Bulbous Moon - The Poems of Sylvia Plath by Amanda Golden & Karen V Kukil (eds) ...

Tatar begins with natural history. The dominant theme is industriousness: spiders work for us day and night. They eat some 400 million tons of insects a year. There are between forty and fifty ...

California Dreaming - The Beverly Hills Housewife: Hockney’s Californian Muse and the World Beyond the Pool by James Cahill ...

Peter Hitchens’s book is a plangent lament for the old Britain, the land of warm beer and lengthening shadows on the village cricket pitch; but it can also be read as an obituary for the old Daily ...

In his superb American Pastoral, Philip Roth displayed signs of wanting to examine his kind of people in greater philosophic depth: Swede Lermontov, a Newark Jew who has moved to the mink-and-manure ...

When Michel Foucault the French post-structural philosopher, died in Paris on 25th June of an alleged septicaemia – a deadly form of body poisoning caused by lethal organisms and eventual infection of ...

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 ...

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 ...