It is hard to understand why the reign of Henry VII has for so long had the reputation of being one of the most boring periods of English history. Perhaps it is because successive generations of ...

Primo Levi (1919–87), Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922–75), Italo Calvino (1923–85) – and Leonardo Sciascia (1921–89), the subject ...

Romantic fiction has deep roots. In a description of King Arthur’s court written around 1155, the poet Wace presented his ...

The Invention of George Sand by Fiona Sampson ...

The old Left–Right divide still exists in France, of course, but its former significance has greatly declined. The parties ...

The Kremlin’s Long Reach - The Death of Trotsky: The True Story of the Plot to Kill Stalin’s Greatest Enemy by Josh Ireland ...

Passage to a Better World - The Revolution to Come: A History of an Idea from Thucydides to Lenin by Dan Edelstein; Revolutions: A New History by Donald Sassoon ...

The European was the Marquis de Morès – explorer, adventurer and far-right demagogue – who aimed to forestall British ...

Charlie Chaplin (1889–1977) gets top billing in the subtitle of Hard Streets but he’s not the star of the show. The book begins with and is built around an earlier rags-to-riches tale and its wider ...

There is something magnificent about the ambition of Iain McGilchrist’s book. It offers nothing less than an account of human nature and Western civilisation as outcomes of the competition between the ...

In Harold Bloom’s native United States, his latest tome has proved something of a publishing phenomenon. When I visited New York last autumn, this academic panorama of Shakespeare was enjoying a ...

Neville Chamberlain was nothing if not a diligent correspondent. Every week he wrote to his sisters Ida and Hilda letters that were in effect a diary of everything he was doing politically. They have ...