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 ...

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 ...

Germany’s siege of Leningrad was one of the Second World War’s worst atrocities. Lasting two and a half years, it killed 700,000 to 800,000 people, somewhere between a quarter and a third of the ...

When Barack Obama was asked what had been the principal frustration of his time in the Oval Office, his instant reply was that he had been utterly stymied on gun control. Amid the carnage (most ...

Do you know what happened in Lyon in AD 177? Or in Milan in 1300? Or in Baroda in 1825? You probably don’t, but you shouldn’t worry: few do. Whatever happened, it was, by ordinary standards, something ...

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 ...

When the journalist and author Kenneth Rose died aged eighty-nine in 2014, he left 350 boxes containing six million words of his journals. He had kept a journal for seventy years. Rose was keenly ...

Ugwu is a teenager from a village in Nigeria who goes to work as a houseboy for a university lecturer, Odenigbo. His aunt tells him that if he works hard, he will eat well. ‘You will even eat meat ...

It is a telling irony that a historical novel could be the quintessential literary work of the post-truth era. Perhaps no other novel better captures the malleability of truth than The Mirror and the ...

The lives of women, both extraordinary and ordinary, and, in particular, the tension between domesticity and independence are subjects frequently revisited in the work of the novelist and biographer ...

PETER ACKROYD SEEMS to be everywhere you look at the moment. His TV series on London has only just left our screens; a short biography of Chaucer was published a few months ago; and it doesn't seem ...

Toni Morrison’s new novel is like the music that gave it its title. It is rhythmic, emotional, controlled even in its wildest moments, skilful, subversive and irresistibly seductive. It is born out of ...