They might seem an incongruous pair at first, but historically speaking Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder are a natural duo for comparative study. When Bruegel entered the painters’ guild ...

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Few victories have been as fast, or as cursed, as Israel’s triumph in the Six Day War. At 7.45am on 5 June 1967, Israeli fighter pilots attacked the Egyptian, Syrian and Jordanian air forces. By the ...

Sylvia Plath began keeping a journal when she was eleven and continued until her death at the age of thirty. This new edition publishes the journals that survive from the last twelve years of her life ...

With The Real Lolita, Sarah Weinman might be said to have invented a completely new genre: true-crime literary criticism, which is not to be confused with truly criminal literary criticism, which, of ...

Not a lot of people know, to quote Mr Caine, that Ludwig Wittgenstein spent philosophically formative periods in Ireland, both in Connemara in the west and in Dublin. In 1948 he fled to wild Connemara ...

In Steven Spielberg’s film War of the Worlds there is a scene which is often missed by audiences, but it captures the fragmentation of the Western world (and with it the decline of Western influence) ...

Max Porter’s first novel, Grief is the Thing with Feathers (2015), was an ingenious debut in which a recently bereaved father and his two sons are comforted by Crow, an imaginary spirit animal based ...

Ammonites and Leaping Fish is a title as engaging as I suspect the author, Penelope Lively, to be. Born in Cairo in 1933, she was a typical upper-class English child of those times. Her father was a ...

For as long as there has been urban civilisation in the Fertile Crescent, there have been bandits eager to plunder its riches. In 610 AD, for instance, a raid was launched by a war band of Arabs on ...

Andrew Miller is a paradoxical novelist. He writes eloquently about isolation in a way that feels modern and relevant, and yet, more often than not, he dips into the past in order to do so. He does it ...

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 ...