Film directors usually make the least promising subjects for biography. They tend to stay behind the camera and get on with making films, emerging only to make the odd promotional statement. Only ...

In January 1937, the mutilated – no, butchered – body of Pamela Werner, a pretty, somewhat naive girl from Britain, was found in Peking, not far from the ice rink where she had been skating and the ...

For a traditionally male-dominated society, China has had its fair share of powerful women who rose to the top, albeit thanks to their husbands. Under the Tang dynasty, Wu Zetian, who lived from 625 ...

Cant is one of those kooky, quaint four-letter words which have long since lost their power to offend. Like ‘culture’, the slipperiness of its meaning makes it almost impossible to define, and much of ...

The mystery of Agatha Christie's extraordinary appeal is the subject for investigation in this engaging study by Robert Barnard, and by the end of the book you should be a lot clearer about the ...

Sir Ian Kershaw has emerged, rather surprisingly, as a towering figure amongst historians of modern Germany. Surprisingly, because he began his career as a medievalist whose focus was Bolton Priory in ...

In April 1958, nineteen-year-old Sheila Delaney, daughter of a Salford bus inspector, sent a manuscript to Joan Littlewood, director of the Theatre Workshop in London. She signed it Shelagh Delaney, ...

Cleaner, babysitter and general dogsbody Agnès Morel has been a fixture in the cathedral town of Chartres for twenty years. Surrounded by gossipy old mesdames, priests who doubt their vocation and an ...

In 1981, Leszek Kolakowski began the introduction to the first volume of his magisterial trilogy Main Currents of Marxism with the statement ‘Karl Marx was a German philosopher.’ If we add ‘who lived ...

On an autumn day in 1680, the 50-year-old Charles II charged Samuel Pepys with an unusual task. Over two three-hour sittings, one on a Sunday evening, the next the following Tuesday morning, the king ...

The vast majority of the world’s hungry are farmers. In a world of such ironies, many turn to faith or fate to explain affliction and its consequences. The mothers Martín Caparrós interviews don’t ...

When Pietro Russell, the anti-hero of A Fool’s Alphabet, thinks of an afterlife, he imagines ‘a hell that is entirely composed of hotel bathrooms’. There will be the bars of soap, too tightly packed ...