Peter Wright, son of a long-wave radio pioneer, was a scientist with a talent for improvisation who flourished in the unstructured environment of the Admiralty Research Laboratory during the Second ...

The year 1918 was an extraordinary historical moment. As the Great War roared to an end after four long years of blood and horror, it appeared briefly that the future of the world lay wide open. The ...

In October 1948 a 37-year-old Waffen-SS officer named Fritz Knöchlein was tried before a British military court in Hamburg for a particularly nasty and gratuitous war crime. It had happened eight ...

The period between the conversion of Constantine the Great in AD 312 and the accession of Theodosius II in AD 408 witnessed one of the most dramatic changes in world history. The Roman Empire, the ...

Dramatised in the 1957 film Ill Met by Moonlight, in which Dirk Bogarde rather improbably played the leading role, Patrick Leigh Fermor’s kidnapping of a German general in Crete in the spring of 1944 ...

Western Europe is in the grip of a cultural illness that is sapping its will to live, claims Douglas Murray in this hard-hitting polemic. Unprecedented levels of immigration, especially from the ...

In the extensive catalogue of royal foolishness, the entry for Marie Antoinette has always bulged disproportionately large. Consort of the portly and ill–fated Louis XVI, she has been portrayed as the ...

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 ...

On an autumn day in 1680, the 50-year-old Charles II charged Samuel Pepys with an unusual task. Over two three-hour sittings, one on a Sunday evening, the next the following Tuesday morning, the king ...

Since, so far as I can tell, all 5 million of the Literary Review’s readers – with the sole exception of myself – are writing/have written at least one book, they will know what I mean by ‘the myths ...

THE READING PUBLIC has long been divided between those who regard Anthony Powell’s Dance to the Music of Time as one of the great achievements of the post-war novel and the author as England’s answer ...

Among the blizzard of acronyms we learned during the pandemic was SAGE, short for Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies. A subgroup within SAGE with a less reassuring acronym was SPI-M, or the ...