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 ...

The earthquake and tsunami in 2011, compounded by radiation contamination, were the most devastating catastrophes to strike Japan since the Second World War. Most cruelly, they hit Tōhoku, the ...

Perhaps there once was a time when you could happily wet the bed, play with your faeces or your sister, barge into your parents bedroom without knocking and still grow up to be a relatively ...

The title of Jérôme Ferrari’s newly translated novel, which won the 2012 Prix Goncourt, refers to the sermon St Augustine delivered after the sacking of Rome by the Visigoth leader Alaric in 410.

Mary Kenny’s essential thesis in this thoughtful book is that popular Irish attitudes to the British monarchy, while formally based on the acceptance of a radical republican repudiation of the Crown ...

The frontispiece to this remarkable book reproduces an 1882 advertisement in a weekly evangelical magazine – a strip cartoon representing, consecutively, children in a doss-house, huddled together ...

David Bentley Hart is an Eastern Orthodox theologian who has made waves in his own sphere through his radical atavism (he refers often to the early Church fathers’ concept of the divine), his sympathy ...

You might shrink from calling a leading Chinese author inscrutable, if that wasn’t the way the Chinese see him too. But Ah Cheng is as much puzzled-over in his homeland as he is widely read. At first ...

Twenty years ago, in A Single Man, Christopher Isherwood gave an account of a teacher's day which, although marred by its mawkish memories of the hero's dead lover, remains both extremely funny as ...

War reporters come in many types and guises (and degrees of honesty). John Hersey was at the peak of the profession during the Second World War, rivalled among Americans only by the GIs’ own ...

History is accelerating, chiefly because the growth of knowledge is increasing exponentially, and knowledge is a powerful fuel. Travel, political decisions, the exchange of information, the inception ...

Behind the Lawrence Legend: the title suggests debunking, iconoclasm, the examination of dirty laundry – another contribution, that is, to the lively tradition of Lawrence-bashing that began with ...