Do you know what happened in Lyon in AD 177? Or in Milan in 1300? Or in Baroda in 1825? You probably don’t, but you shouldn’t worry: few do. Whatever happened, it was, by ordinary standards, something ...

Unconventional lives can tell us much about the conventions and social currents of their times. Susannah Stapleton’s compulsively absorbing book about Maud West centres on a woman who was a splendid ...

What makes reading Margaret Atwood such fun is her gift for enjoying herself so thoroughly as she writes. She makes you share her zest for words, people, jokes, sharp-edged description and endless ...

It is a telling irony that a historical novel could be the quintessential literary work of the post-truth era. Perhaps no other novel better captures the malleability of truth than The Mirror and the ...

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 ...

The Western Isles are often shrunk from the scale afforded the mainland of Britain so as to fit onto a page of an atlas. Love of Country should serve to restore spaciousness, air and attention to this ...

Memories, memories, ah, fond memories! Flicking rapidly through the above-mentioned tome for the purposes of this review, I could not help but recall those golden days in the early Seventies – or was ...

Under its longest-serving editor, Graydon Carter, Vanity Fair was that rare thing – a New York society magazine that published serious journalism. @PeterPeteryork looks at what Carter got right. Peter ...

Coleshill is an idiosyncratic version of Auden’s ‘Thanksgiving for a Habitat’, a loving evocation and transformation of the Wiltshire village and landscape where Fiona Sampson feels most at home. Her ...

No doubt I will not be the last to remark that this is the most fascinating book Patrick McGrath did not write. It has all the ingredients of one of McGrath’s icily stylish novels: madness, violence, ...

The Oxford Book of English Prose, edited by Arthur Quiller-Couch, appeared in November 1925, exactly twenty-five years after The Oxford Book of English Verse. The immense success of the latter, ...

UNLIKE HITLER OR Stalin, of whom there are any number of decent modern biographies, Mussolini still seems ill-served by historians, at least those writing in English. A couple of years ago the ...