Why did the sheltered daughter of a Church of England minister, brought up to be deeply suspicious of Catholics, take the drastic step of walking into a Brussels church, finding a confessional and ...

In the Penguin translation of Catullus two words are left untranslated. ‘Pedicabo et irrumabo vos’, writes the poet of his foes Furius and Aurelius and ‘pedicabo et irrumabo vos’ is how it stays in ...

The forbears whom Evelyn Waugh affectionately described in his unfinished autobiography A Little Leaning were professional men as far back as the eye could see: clergymen (mostly Scotch divines in the ...

When Michel Foucault the French post-structural philosopher, died in Paris on 25th June of an alleged septicaemia – a deadly form of body poisoning caused by lethal organisms and eventual infection of ...

In 1999 Geert Mak, a Dutch journalist, was given an enviable commission by his newspaper: to travel throughout Europe in the last months of the century, reporting daily on the condition of the ...

Yesterday I drove ten minutes from my apartment to a place that delights me: Sormiou, in southernmost Marseille. Not to the famously idyllic calanque (or cove) of that name, but to the hulking Leclerc ...

Clarissa Churchill is the niece of one prime minister, Winston Churchill, and the wife of another, Anthony Eden, who succeeded Churchill. From this you might deduce that she is a political groupie and ...

In 1843, two years before her death at the age of seventy-two, Cassandra Austen told her brother Charles that she had been ‘looking over & destroying some of my Papers’, but was keeping ‘a few letters ...

Metroland is divided into three sections. In the first section, we meet Toni and Chris as schoolboys who share a devotion to the intangible values of art, and a constant desire to ‘épater le bourgeois ...

A telling French phrase to describe a girl who has lost her virginity is elle a vu le loup (‘she has seen the wolf’). This is just one of the many delectable facts waiting to be discovered in Shahidha ...

Get ready to start hearing a lot about Martin Luther. On 31 October 2017 it will be five hundred years since Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, ...

This is the most distressing work that I have reviewed in the last half-century. Yet Ray Monk has written a fine book, mastering a daunting mass of material; it is written forcefully and with great ...