The Kremlin’s Long Reach - The Death of Trotsky: The True Story of the Plot to Kill Stalin’s Greatest Enemy by Josh Ireland ...

The old Left–Right divide still exists in France, of course, but its former significance has greatly declined. The parties that embody this ideological opposition are now in crisis or moribund.

Charlie Chaplin (1889–1977) gets top billing in the subtitle of Hard Streets but he’s not the star of the show. The book begins with and is built around an earlier rags-to-riches tale and its wider ...

The Invention of George Sand by Doubleday 400pp £22 ...

The European was the Marquis de Morès – explorer, adventurer and far-right demagogue – who aimed to forestall British influence in the region by opening up a route for French trade and colonisation.

This collection of stories forms a Gulag memoir to rival Solzhenitsyn’s, as Solzhenitsyn himself acknowledged. Between 1954 and 1973, after fifteen years spent mainly in the camps of the Kolyma region ...

It is the end of harvest for a small, tight-knit community who depend on the land to survive. The poor yield should be their prime concern but one night the local manor house is set on fire, its ...

It is odd to read a novel one simultaneously admires and loathes. The admiration is for the book’s intelligence, lack of sentimentality and often extraordinary phrase-making: the loathing is for the ...

The English author who perhaps most closely resembled Stefan Zweig was his near-contemporary Somerset Maugham. Maugham lived longer, and wrote more full-length novels and fewer biographical and ...

Ugwu is a teenager from a village in Nigeria who goes to work as a houseboy for a university lecturer, Odenigbo. His aunt tells him that if he works hard, he will eat well. ‘You will even eat meat ...

One of the most important facts about Michel Houellebecq – usually overlooked in favour of his nihilism, alleged racism and other attention-seeking provocations – is that he is a first-rate prose ...

A few years before his death in 1900, Henry Sidgwick, the founding president of the Society for Psychical Research, despairingly conceded that ‘we have not, and are never likely to have, empirical ...