Early in the 19th century, there were some 260,000 of them across Britain’s naval and merchant fleets. People called them Jacks, but they are mostly nameless – or nameless to history. Even on ...

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more. Thomas W Hodgkinson - There Was No Sorcerer Thomas W Hodgkinson: There Was No Sorcerer - Box Office Poison: ...

Blake Gopnik’s life of Andy Warhol is less the chronicle of an advance towards death than a protracted postmortem. Gopnik begins halfway through, at what must have seemed to Warhol like the end. In ...

You might shrink from calling a leading Chinese author inscrutable, if that wasn’t the way the Chinese see him too. But Ah Cheng is as much puzzled-over in his homeland as he is widely read. At first ...

Stephan Thernstrom, 56, a professor at Harvard University for 25 years, is considered one of the pre-eminent scholars of the history of race relations in America. He has tenure. He has won prizes and ...

I have often heard it said that Lt-Gen Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart, VC, KBE, CB, CMG, DSO, provided the model for Evelyn Waugh’s immortal Brigadier Ritchie-Hook. Carton de Wiart won his Cross, and was ...

The forbears whom Evelyn Waugh affectionately described in his unfinished autobiography A Little Leaning were professional men as far back as the eye could see: clergymen (mostly Scotch divines in the ...

British constitutional experts have a lot to get their teeth into in 2020. The last three years have exposed several fault lines: over parliamentary procedure, the interaction of direct and ...

Dainty enough to perch at the top of a Christmas stocking, Adrian Tinniswood’s celebration of the Victorian rise and mid-20th-century slow collapse of the country house party is a richly anecdotal ...

Thomas W Hodgkinson: There Was No Sorcerer - Box Office Poison: Hollywood’s Story in a Century of Flops by Tim Robey Thomas W Hodgkinson - There Was No Sorcerer Thomas W Hodgkinson: There Was No ...

Spinoza, according to Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy, is ‘the noblest and most lovable of the great philosophers’. As a natural consequence of his ethical supremacy, Russell adds, ...

Soul? What Soul? An alluring book title, I’m sure. What about a book called ‘The Soul of England?’ The Chinese soul, ancient or modern, like other souls, longs for freedom and wealth, material and ...