Few people produce a new book in their hundredth year; fewer still at that age produce a book containing original ideas. But if anyone was going to do it, it surely had to be James Lovelock. He has ...

‘My supreme idea is to get on’, wrote the young David Lloyd George to his sweetheart, Margaret Owen, during their prolonged courtship. Ominously, he added: ‘I am prepared to thrust even love itself ...

Protect them Lord in all their fights, And, even more, protect the whites. (From ‘In Westminster Abbey’) Historians of the Second World War have increasingly seen it as a gigantic showdown between the ...

‘I am not an Afro-pessimist,’ writes Paul Theroux, looking back on a journey that has taken him from the slums of Cape Town to the musseques of Luanda. You could have fooled me. The Last Train to Zona ...

Cleaner, babysitter and general dogsbody Agnès Morel has been a fixture in the cathedral town of Chartres for twenty years. Surrounded by gossipy old mesdames, priests who doubt their vocation and an ...

It is one of the intriguing contradictions of the Renaissance that the art for which this period is justly famous was the product of a society mired in corruption and notorious for its violence – on ...

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 ...

A stiff-leaf capital is a distinctive English style of carving from the early 13th century, a decorative flourish of foliage to top off a column. But although it originated in a specific time and ...

Geoffrey Hill is, in the opinion of many, the best poet now writing in England, though he is not the best known. He was born in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, in 1932, the only child of a police ...

Western Europe is in the grip of a cultural illness that is sapping its will to live, claims Douglas Murray in this hard-hitting polemic. Unprecedented levels of immigration, especially from the ...

Albert Camus wrote that ‘the world needs real dialogue, that falsehood is just as much the opposite of dialogue as is silence, and that the only possible dialogue is the kind between people who remain ...

This large book is both rewarding and demanding. It offers information in abundance and, like Sir Barry Cunliffe’s previous publications from OUP, it is beautifully written and illustrated. But what ...