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 ...

Do we experience life as a continuum or as a series of disconnected shocks and accidents? Alice Munro started writing at a time when novelists, at least, were preoccupied with coherence, with ...

Ravensbrück was never intended as a death camp. The only concentration camp built entirely for women, it was planned by Himmler as a place of labour and re-education for prostitutes, Gypsies, ...

If one goal of modern biography is to lay bare secrets and perversions, then Salvador Dalí must necessarily make a disappointing subject, for he spent a lucrative lifetime laying them all bare himself ...

In March 1942, while working in wartime London as assistant to the Director of Naval Intelligence, Lieutenant-Commander Ian Fleming proposed the creation of a tiny but dedicated front-line unit of ...

Kit de Waal’s second novel, The Trick to Time, begins with Mona, a sixty-year-old Irish immigrant, standing by her window in the middle of the night. She notices a man in the building across from her ...

Julian Bell's Mirror of the World naturally invites comparison with E H Gombrich's The Story of Art, now in its sixteenth edition and reprinted every year but one since it was first published by ...

THE JEROME SISTERS were the first wave of American beauties to marry into the British aristocracy, the precursors of a tide of 'Dollar Princesses' eager to swap cash for titles. Unlike their ...

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 English love to hate Wallis Simpson. She is vilified as the gold-digging sex goddess who stole our film-star king, Edward VIII. Hugo Vickers has spent a lifetime following Wallis. At the age of ...

In 1939 and for at least the next fifteen years, Peter Fleming was much more successful and famous than his younger brother Ian. He was known as an explorer and adventurer, wrote bestselling books and ...

Turnworth, in Dorset, lies hidden away to the west of Blandford Forum and south of Sturminster Newton. The most recent estimate suggests that there are thirty inhabitants. In 1861, that figure was 150 ...