In 1848, the wave of political uprisings taking place across Europe reached the Frankfurt street where the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer was living, comfortably, off money from his father’s shipping ...

Raymond Tallis: Happily Ever After? - The Immortalization Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death by John Gray ...

In 1843, two years before her death at the age of seventy-two, Cassandra Austen told her brother Charles that she had been ‘looking over & destroying some of my Papers’, but was keeping ‘a few letters ...

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 ...

Historians of Restoration London know John Ogilby (c 1600–1676) for the marvellous post-Fire survey of the capital that he produced with his step-grandson, William Morgan, which was published in 1677; ...

‘Hiking with Nietzsche’ sounds like the premise of a darkly humorous sitcom or the punishment for an existential crime. Rhetorically ferocious, intellectually conceited and, for much of his life, ...

In 1954 I received a long and highly articulate letter from Caryl Chessman, who had then been six years on Death Row in San Quentin Prison, California, awaiting electrocution for kidnapping and theft.

DAVID PEACE BEGAN the first novel of his acclaimed Red Riding Quartet, about the Ripper killings and other grim goings-on in Yorkshire in the 1970s and 1980s, with a quotation from Harry S Truman: ...

‘My whole life has been a search for the miraculous,’ Bruce Chatwin says. Each of these essays, fragments and sketches written between 1972 and the author’s recent death are way-stations in the search ...

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 1971 Bernard Levin wrote an excoriating article in The Times about the lately deceased former Lord Chief Justice Rayner Goddard, a noisome piece of legal excrement who is said to have ejaculated ...

At one point in Defining Hitler its author asks the reader the rhetorical question: why bother to read this book? For many writers this would be a merited act of authorial self-destruction. In Haffner ...