Ever since Shakespeare labelled Richard, Duke of Gloucester, a ‘murderous Machiavel’, the word ‘Machiavellian’ in popular culture has meant being devious, cunning, scheming and quite prepared for the ...

While on holiday three years ago in Taormina, Sicily, I found in a souvenir shop swimming trunks in the Italian colours with a picture of Mussolini in full military fig. The bathers bore the caption ...

It is remarkable that, in the huge tide of material written on Hitler’s Third Reich over the past half-century, there has not been a single-volume history of the Reich’s economy in English (though ...

Geoffrey Hill is, in the opinion of many, the best poet now writing in England, though he is not the best known. He was born in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, in 1932, the only child of a police ...

When Clara Petacci, known as Claretta, first met Mussolini in April 1932, she was a gushing, busty young Fascist of twenty, with dark hair, a prominent nose and good legs; he was forty-nine, ...

This is the age of finding out who you were, and the country record offices buzz with rural claimants. Every Tom and Harriet is queuing up to trace his or her bloodlines on the microfilm. What the ...

Writing about nature is no stroll in the park. I speak from experience, having set a novel on a farm in the 1970s and taught creative writing in various rural parts of England. Sometimes we send ...

Of all the aspects of the Third Reich, it is perhaps the SS that attracts the most junk history. Observed through the prisms of Hollywood and various war mags such as Commando and War Picture Library, ...

Norman Mailer’s new novel opens with a sequence so good you believe for a moment he may have written the book his friends and critics agreed was inside him. On the coast of Maine, lyrically described, ...

Duff Cooper (1890–1964) is remembered today as the husband of Lady Diana Cooper. He was a Conservative politician and ambassador to Paris; he was also a writer and biographer, and he wrote an ...

This is a great idea for a book, but imperfectly executed; witness the irritating use of a partially italicized title. Robert Poole’s uncontentious theme is that humankind’s (he prefers ‘man’s’) view ...

Simon Schama is a professional historian who teaches at Harvard University. He is also a popular historian, whose 1983 book about the French Revolution, Citizens, became a well-deserved bestseller.