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 ...

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 ...

Clodia Metelli has gone down in history as one of the great femmes fatales of ancient Rome. Cicero shuddered at her ‘confident airs’ and intense ‘oxen eyes’ and jibed at her fondness for holidaying in ...

‘Imagine the subject of balloons crops up,’ said the veteran Cabinet secretary Maurice Hankey, illustrating the difference between Winston Churchill and David Lloyd George. ‘Winston, without a blink, ...

When Henry Kissinger took office as National Security Advisor to Richard Nixon in 1969, he was told to avoid live press conferences like the plague because ordinary Americans would be horrified by his ...

Some years ago, staying in Alsace, I was asked if I would be interested in visiting a Nazi concentration camp in the vicinity. I had never heard of the place, Natzweiler, and had no idea that such an ...

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, ...

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 ...

Sylvia Plath began keeping a journal when she was eleven and continued until her death at the age of thirty. This new edition publishes the journals that survive from the last twelve years of her life ...

In 1960, after a climbing accident in North Wales, Al Alvarez’s broken leg was set so badly that over the next thirty years all the cartilage in his ankle gradually wore away. By 1993, aged 63, this ...

It is in the nature of the aristocracy to trade on ancestral connections. Having previously written a history of his family and of Althorp, their stately home, Charles Spencer has now come up with a ...

‘I used to think that autobiography was a form of weakness, and perhaps I still do. But I also think that, if you’re weak, it’s childish to pretend to be strong.’ When she wrote her memoir, Giving Up ...