At the heart of Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights, which first lit up our imaginations over twenty years ago, is the exceptionally close bond between the heroine, Lyra, and her dæmon, Pantalaimon (a ...

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 ...

OLD AGE IS not for wimps. The only thing we can all be certain of is that we are going to die: but it's the manner of our going that is most painful to contemplate. Will we die in our sleep, peaceay ...

‘The hope is that this body of law will serve as a barrier against the collective wickedness, greed and folly of any nation’, wrote Martha Gellhorn as she watched the twenty – one German leaders being ...

Marc Morris is an up-and-coming historian, with a biography of Edward I and an influential volume on castles already under his belt. Here he attempts an ambitious overview of the Norman conquest from ...

In Arabia Jonathan Raban suggested that if the Arabs were to acquire a genuine contemporary literature, it would be written by women ‘because women were the only people living under the kind of strain ...

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 ...

Sir Ian Kershaw has emerged, rather surprisingly, as a towering figure amongst historians of modern Germany. Surprisingly, because he began his career as a medievalist whose focus was Bolton Priory in ...

In the long history of Western culture, it is given to very few to have an entire era named after them. Socrates sits within Antiquity, Leonardo da Vinci within the Renaissance; even Shakespeare has ...

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 ...

In 1971 Bernard Levin wrote an excoriating article in The Times about the lately deceased former Lord Chief Justice Rayner Goddard, a noisome piece of legal excrement who is said to have ejaculated ...

What was a witch? This deceptively simple question has prompted fierce debate among scholars for many years. There are several possible sources of the word, including the Old English wicca (meaning ...