‘This is the story of two middle-class families’, a prefatory note to All Our Yesterdays tells us; two families, it goes on, that suffer the ‘impact of Mussolini’s fascism’. It is also a ‘simple story ...

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, ...

Stephen Greenblatt’s ardent and involving new book is concerned with rulers and aspirants in Shakespeare who abuse their power. It draws attention to a very wide range of characters. There are the out ...

Norma Clarke: Hutch Ado About Nothing - The Imposteress Rabbit Breeder: Mary Toft and Eighteenth-Century England by Karen Harvey ...

Retired politicians have cornered the market in biographies of great leaders. These books annoy historians because they pinch their research and sell more copies. They tend to be uncritically admiring ...

The story of the Younghusband Mission, or invasion of Tibet, has been told many times. Within a year of reaching Lhasa five of its participants wrote what we would now call instant books. They ...

Jeremy Lewis: Those Inky Scoundrels - More Matter: Essays and Criticism by John Updike ...

Max Adams tells his readers very early on that ‘the real Dark Age in British history can be found in Book I of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History’. It is this lacuna, the period between 580 and 710, that ...

‘Mindfulness’ is due a backlash, surely. And it starts here. Sort of. The authors, both psychologists, and one an experienced meditator with a lifelong interest in spiritual matters, originally set ...

Nadine Gordimer is one of the great figures of our time. A political activist and excoriating critic in apartheid-era South Africa, she has more recently campaigned for social justice and AIDS ...

This is a strange book, written with considerable charm and plenty of gorgeous detail, but difficult in many ways to get a handle on. The life referred to in the title is not Philip Hensher’s own, but ...

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 ...