Corresponding with Bertrand Russell in 1922, Joseph Conrad confessed: ‘I have never been able to find in any man’s book or any man’s talk anything … to stand up for a moment against my deep-seated ...

Who was Charles de Gaulle? Stop the clock in 1939 and he was an eccentric army officer. Stop it in July 1940, after he had flown to London, and he was claiming to represent France against the Vichy ...

In 1843, two years before her death at the age of seventy-two, Cassandra Austen told her brother Charles that she had been ‘looking over & destroying some of my Papers’, but was keeping ‘a few letters ...

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 ...

Get ready to start hearing a lot about Martin Luther. On 31 October 2017 it will be five hundred years since Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, ...

I’m going to start this review with an admission: I have next to no idea what this book is about. Not in a literal sense, obviously; there is a writer called Rachel Cusk, who used to be married and ...

Maps are perpetually fascinating. Ostensibly their purpose is to clarify, but to anyone with a grain of imagination they are a source of wonder. Who has not, at one time or another, placed a finger on ...

Sue Prideaux’s biography tells a familiar story. Born into a religious family, Friedrich Nietzsche is a brilliant young student of philology, not philosophy, and soon becomes a professor in Basel, ...

In Berlin at the end of the 1920s, a set of fake Van Goghs sent the art world reeling. The paintings had passed through the hands of Otto Wacker, an obscure Berlin art dealer, and had long been ...

In her York prison Margaret Clitherow practised for her execution. She stripped naked and put on a crude linen shift she had made, unstitched at the sides. Then she lay flat on the stones. The next ...

When Hitler sent Rommel to north Africa in January 1941, Nazi interest in the Arab world burgeoned. From then until the end of the war the Third Reich invested heavily in trying to win over Muslim ...

This is a touching and often fascinating memoir, the story of a serendipitous relationship between two very different men: a thinker, writer and talker of genius, and an editor with a strong tendency ...