Many people are unlucky, but few have the ill fortune of Tsutomu Yamaguchi. An engineer with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, he was dispatched to Hiroshima for three months in 1945. On the morning of 6 ...

Jacobsen’s hypothetical scenario centres on a genetically modified strain of plague, one of history’s most devastating ...

Ancient Rome was a culture governed by the spoken word and Cicero was the most articulate public speaker Rome ever produced. Furthermore, the Middle Ages were comparatively kind to his legacy and ...

How the Americas Transformed Renaissance England, Lauren Working observes that these indigenous men may well have been recently captured and brought to London. English colonists were patrolling ...

A Bulbous Moon - The Poems of Sylvia Plath by Amanda Golden & Karen V Kukil (eds) ...

Tatar begins with natural history. The dominant theme is industriousness: spiders work for us day and night. They eat some 400 million tons of insects a year. There are between forty and fifty ...

California Dreaming - The Beverly Hills Housewife: Hockney’s Californian Muse and the World Beyond the Pool by James Cahill ...

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 ...

Richard Gott’s Britain’s Empire: Resistance, Repression and Revolt is a comprehensive and passionate denunciation of the militaristic side of imperial life. Gott narrowly focuses on a period in which ...

If you had been in the vicinity of the Turk’s Head Tavern on Soho’s Gerrard Street on a Friday evening in the second half of the 18th century, you might have recognised a number of famous men ...

A few years ago, when I was interviewing the Argentinian tenor José Cura, he groaned at the publicity that was about to surround an exhibition of his photographs in Paris. 'I know it'll all be about ...

One of the most important facts about Michel Houellebecq – usually overlooked in favour of his nihilism, alleged racism and other attention-seeking provocations – is that he is a first-rate prose ...