On Wednesday 28 January 1756, the Jamaican planter Thomas Thistlewood made a brief entry in his journal: ‘Had Derby well whipped, and made Egypt shit in his face.’ The punishment was not a one-off; ...

At one point in Defining Hitler its author asks the reader the rhetorical question: why bother to read this book? For many writers this would be a merited act of authorial self-destruction. In Haffner ...

What was a witch? This deceptively simple question has prompted fierce debate among scholars for many years. There are several possible sources of the word, including the Old English wicca (meaning ...

In the early pages of In the Land of Giants, Max Adams quotes an eighth-century Anglo-Saxon poem that describes the shattered stone shells and jagged masonry still standing, three centuries after the ...

Kudos is the third and final part of a fictional project Rachel Cusk conceived in the wake of Aftermath, her 2012 divorce memoir. An examination of her experience in the light of Greek tragedy, ...

A sepulchral castle, a despotic lord, a guiltless maiden and a spectral, troubled antihero – these were the ingredients of the gothic novel at the high midnight of its popularity. Catherine Bailey’s ...

Dorling Kindersley, otherwise known as DK, was one of the greatest publishing phenomena of recent times. Springing up from nothing in a back bedroom in Kennington in 1974, it was the brainchild of ...

‘The whole point of this book’, the award-winning epidemiologist Professor Tim Spector informs readers of Spoon-Fed, ‘is not to tell you how or what to eat’ – a refreshing change for those who have to ...

Norman Lewis only just scraped into The Oxford Companion to English Literature in his tenth decade, three years before his death in 2003. Even then, it was the briefest of entries, naming merely two ...

Posterity judges us by what we do, our friends by what we are. People whose lives have been more essence than action are frustrating subjects for biographers. If those who remember him are to be ...

Until the 1980s, the literature on Israel’s history was dominated by respectful biographies of the country’s founders and turgid multi-volume histories of central institutions such as the army and the ...

Lucie Aubrac was a young French woman who became an instant celebrity in 1944 when she was flown out of France by the RAF and identified by the BBC as the heroine who had ambushed a German prison van, ...