The story of Edward Whalley and William Goffe, two of the three signatories of Charles I’s death warrant who fled to New England after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, has seen a revival of ...

Byron Rogers begins this charming and deftly written book about R S Thomas with a meditation on the question which ought to keep literary biographers awake at night: Why bother? Thomas himself put the ...

It may be thought that the notorious Cambridge spies – the majority of them members of the Apostles, that university’s secretive, elitist society – had been written out. But, as Stalin’s Apostles ...

For Edward Gibbon, the decline of the Roman Empire was a matter of blame. He did not hesitate to condemn a fatal combination of violent barbarian invasion and the growing popularity of Christianity ...

The Dublin Bar has a long tradition of learned counsel who have doubled as scholars of the humanities. At University College Dublin, Frank Callanan completed an undergraduate degree in history before ...

For half a century, James Graham Ballard lived in the tranquil riverside village of Shepperton off the M3. The Thames Valley suburb was almost destroyed by Martians in The War of the Worlds, and in ...

Sir Francis Bacon (1561–1626) famously argued that gunpowder was one of the inventions which, though ‘unknown to the ancients’, had most transformed the ‘whole face and state of things throughout the ...

The defining sequence of postwar British cinema might be Barbara Windsor’s bra pinging off during a callisthenics workout on a dreary campsite. For French film, it’s probably Alain Delon consuming a ...

The trouble with the deep sea is that it is dark and very far away. This is not the realm of glorious pink coral reefs surrounded by bewitching tropical fish. All of that lives in the light. In the ...

The classicist Curtis Dozier has been documenting white nationalists’ strange obsession with Graeco-Roman antiquity on the website Pharos since 2017. There is an abundance of evidence. During the ...

When Paul Thek and Peter Hujar’s mutual friend, the author Linda Rosenkrantz, portrayed the two artists in her 1968 novel Talk, it was as a single character named Clem Nye. While he never appears in ...

After centuries in the shadows, Mercia has suddenly become fashionable. Recent months have brought us Max Adams’s The Mercian Chronicles (ironically, as the kingdom had no chronicles of its own) and ...