In October 1726 some ‘strange, but well attested’ news emerged from Godalming near Guildford. An ‘eminent’ surgeon, a male midwife, had delivered a poor woman called Mary Toft not of a child but of ...

In the long history of Western culture, it is given to very few to have an entire era named after them. Socrates sits within Antiquity, Leonardo da Vinci within the Renaissance; even Shakespeare has ...

What is perhaps most striking about Tell Them of Battles, Kings and Elephants is its slightness. The latest work to appear in English by Mathias Enard – the heavily garlanded darling of French letters ...

Fanny Duberly was the horse-loving wife of a Victorian cavalry officer. When the Crimean War broke out in 1854 she was twenty-six, cheerful, childless and strong-minded. She was among the handful of ...

History is accelerating, chiefly because the growth of knowledge is increasing exponentially, and knowledge is a powerful fuel. Travel, political decisions, the exchange of information, the inception ...

War reporters come in many types and guises (and degrees of honesty). John Hersey was at the peak of the profession during the Second World War, rivalled among Americans only by the GIs’ own ...

Anthony Gottlieb’s new book is the second instalment in a planned three-part history of Western philosophy. The first volume, The Dream of Reason, took the story from Socrates and Plato to the ...

Mick Herron’s Slough House spy thrillers are, by now, one of the least well-kept secrets in espionage fiction. Everyone with even half an eye on the genre knows he’s somewhere near the top. He is ...

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 ...

While on holiday three years ago in Taormina, Sicily, I found in a souvenir shop swimming trunks in the Italian colours with a picture of Mussolini in full military fig. The bathers bore the caption ...

George Saunders’s six short stories and one novella take the reader on a bizarre odyssey into the dark reaches of the author’s febrile imagination, a world turned upside down and populated by weirdos ...

William Boyd’s novel Restless, winner of the 2006 Costa Novel Award, describes the adventures of Eva, a young Russian émigrée, who is recruited for the British Secret Service during the Second World ...