The death of Isabella de’ Medici, favourite daughter of Cosimo, Grand Duke of Tuscany, was as squalid as her life had been glittering. She was strangled in a particularly unpleasant and elaborate way ...

Midnight at the Pera Palace is a vibrant, entertaining and dazzlingly original social history not only of the city of Istanbul at the dawn of the modern era, but also of the many worlds that ...

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 ...

‘My whole life has been a search for the miraculous,’ Bruce Chatwin says. Each of these essays, fragments and sketches written between 1972 and the author’s recent death are way-stations in the search ...

This collection of stories forms a Gulag memoir to rival Solzhenitsyn’s, as Solzhenitsyn himself acknowledged. Between 1954 and 1973, after fifteen years spent mainly in the camps of the Kolyma region ...

This magisterial volume, a sequel to Britain’s Imperial Century, 1815–1914 (1976), is the distillation of a lifetime’s learning and teaching about the British Empire. The earlier work, Ronald Hyam ...

I approached this book with low expectations. Ho-hum, I thought, a book about radiation written by a professor of radiation medicine. Probably some dull memoir by a retired old boy. How wrong I was.

Some years ago, staying in Alsace, I was asked if I would be interested in visiting a Nazi concentration camp in the vicinity. I had never heard of the place, Natzweiler, and had no idea that such an ...

The English author who perhaps most closely resembled Stefan Zweig was his near-contemporary Somerset Maugham. Maugham lived longer, and wrote more full-length novels and fewer biographical and ...

‘Imagine the subject of balloons crops up,’ said the veteran Cabinet secretary Maurice Hankey, illustrating the difference between Winston Churchill and David Lloyd George. ‘Winston, without a blink, ...

Women are afraid of men. Not all of them, all of the time, but they know that men are capable of mixing sex and violence. Men sometimes do what women seldom, if ever do – commit rape. ‘After she was ...

This is a truly excellent book, one of the best it has been my pleasure to read in the line of duty for years. Joanne Harris achieves everything a novelist should aim for, with no sense of effort or ...