We people of the Anglosphere need to learn the peculiar use among German-speaking economists of the Latin word ordo (‘arrangement’), as in der Ordoliberalismus. The historian Quinn Slobodian’s ...

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 ...

Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of independent India, was so enthused by hydroelectric dams that he called them the ‘new temples of India’. In Unruly Waters, Sunil Amrith tells the ...

One of the many pernicious acts of destruction committed by the Nazis against Britain in the Second World War was the burning of Holland House by incendiary bombs in September 1940. Bits of it remain, ...

A great and subtle poet, a haughty and defensive noble, an enigmatic but reckless youth, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, blazed a trail through the reign of Henry VIII only to be executed for treason ...

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 ...

MARGARET FORSTER IS the author of this fictional diary, a revelation which disappointed this reader; a compulsive diarist myself, I had thought it was genuine. Forster's invented diarist is a Miss ...

IT IS NO disparagement of Esther Freud's many talents to say that The Sea House has a rather familiar atmosphere. There is the picturesque East of England setting ('Steerborough' is transparently the ...

This exceptional book is billed as garden writing, but it is garden writing only in the sense that Moby-Dick is a treatise on whales. There is no need to have the slightest knowledge of or interest in ...

‘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 ...

Conflict between the forces of light and dark has long been the stuff of storytelling, but seldom is the hero a work of architecture. In effect this is what Simon Mawer has done in his engrossing new ...

The blurb of The Famine Plot claims that Tim Pat Coogan is Ireland’s leading historian. This is not exactly right, but it is true that Coogan’s works sell widely and have a significant influence both ...