What is perhaps most striking about Tell Them of Battles, Kings and Elephants is its slightness. The latest work to appear in English by Mathias Enard – the heavily garlanded darling of French letters ...

The sky was as black as ink and we could scarcely see the lights of the disappearing port. A chill, damp wind whistled, yet we felt stifled by the heavy rain clouds above us. The crew had trooped onto ...

Reading the publisher's blurb for this novel, I'm disappointed. It promises an 'exciting new departure' from Maggie O'Farrell's previous work, the best book you'll read all year, and so on. 'Exciting' ...

Historians of Restoration London know John Ogilby (c 1600–1676) for the marvellous post-Fire survey of the capital that he produced with his step-grandson, William Morgan, which was published in 1677; ...

Remarkable polymath though he was, Pavel Florensky should not, perhaps, be compared to Leonardo da Vinci. For one thing, he had no patron: Stalin, unlike Cesare Borgia or King Francis I, preferred to ...

For those of us who lead lives of quiet desperation this book puts matters into perspective. The journalist Peter Zimonjic was on one of the three Tube trains – a bus was also blown up – bombed on 7 ...

UNLIKE HITLER OR Stalin, of whom there are any number of decent modern biographies, Mussolini still seems ill-served by historians, at least those writing in English. A couple of years ago the ...

DESPITE ANNE MELLOR’s promise to examine ‘the entire range of Mary Shelley’s life and writing’, two-thirds of this book are dedicated to an analysis of Frankenstein, ‘Shelley’s greatest novel’ ...

The earthquake and tsunami in 2011, compounded by radiation contamination, were the most devastating catastrophes to strike Japan since the Second World War. Most cruelly, they hit Tōhoku, the ...

Many years ago now, when communism collapsed in Europe, I recall an unrepentant Marxist friend arguing the case that at long last a real Marxist revolution could take place in the former Soviet bloc.

Perhaps there once was a time when you could happily wet the bed, play with your faeces or your sister, barge into your parents bedroom without knocking and still grow up to be a relatively ...

The existence of Fashion depends on people buying more clothes than they wear out. If a garment is replaced only when it is worn out there is no Fashion, if it is worn beyond its natural replacement ...