In her latest book, which tells the stories of three generations of women, and the men who love them, Penelope Lively presents us with a wholesome vision of England. It begins in 1935, when a ...

I realised almost as soon as I began reading Norman Davies’s new history of the Second World War in Europe that I was not the best person to review it. In his introduction he says, without a blushing ...

Towards the end of Peter Ackroyd’s first novel, The Great Fire of London, he says; ‘This is not a true story but certain things follow from other things.’ It is a good description of his latest novel, ...

John the Painter (not to be confused with Peter the Painter, the Latvian anarchist/terrorist involved in the Sidney Street siege of 1911, in which Winston Churchill first won notoriety) was the nom de ...

Books of photography and text – whether conflations of picture postcards and tourist brochure writing or imaginative marriages of language and photographic image – have formed a genre of their own.

Like most literary academics of my generation, I first came across Alastair Fowler through his superbly annotated 1968 edition of Paradise Lost. John Mullan – a critic Fowler cites, admiringly, and ...

Whether looking down from above or up from below, Napoleon must be well satisfied with the attention he has been receiving two hundred years after his fall. He has recently been the subject of new ...

John Gray: Being Human - At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being and Apricot Cocktails by Sarah Bakewell ...

Frank Dikötter: Number Two Capitalist Roader - Deng Xiaoping: A Revolutionary Life by Alexander V Pantsov & Steven I Levine ...

We people of the Anglosphere need to learn the peculiar use among German-speaking economists of the Latin word ordo (‘arrangement’), as in der Ordoliberalismus. The historian Quinn Slobodian’s ...

In Berlin at the end of the 1920s, a set of fake Van Goghs sent the art world reeling. The paintings had passed through the hands of Otto Wacker, an obscure Berlin art dealer, and had long been ...

The Scapegoat is Sophia Nikolaidou’s first book to be translated into English, despite her considerable literary reputation in Greece. It opens with the death of an American journalist as he is ...