Once upon a time, an ambitious ruler concerned about a rising power on the other side of the globe decided to place a puppet king on a nearby throne in a country that was beautiful, rich in natural ...

A New Biography of Lawrence Durrell, 1912–45 by Michael Haag; The Durrells: The Story of a Family by Richard Bradford ...

John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers by Jean Strouse; John Singer Sargent: The Charcoal Portraits by Richard Ormond ...

Keith Houston’s history of emojis reveals that explicit images as well as political provocations, flagrant brand ...

Some modern scholars believe these to be forgeries written later in antiquity, designed to give the otherwise shadowy figure ...

My Sister and Other Lovers by Esther Freud ...

When Churchill declared victory, the young people of the church paraded a full-size effigy of Adolf Hitler to the green and ...

What does it mean to be modern? The answer was largely determined rather early in the modern era by three thinkers who, as luck would have it, not only came from the same place and spoke the same ...

According to the American academic William Kelleher Storey, Rhodes was able to go a long way towards realising his vision ...

Looking at the triumphs and turpitude of the modern world, the temptation is always to seek someone responsible. In 1900, succumbing to that temptation, Mark Twain pointed to the 15th-century German ...

In the middle of March 1931, Virginia Woolf wrote a polite letter to a woman sixteen years her junior. The recipient, a feminist writer named Winifred Holtby, was embarking on a book-length study of ...

Tolerance does not come naturally to humankind. For most of recorded history, what people believed about the natural world, about government and society or about the moral code was laid down by ...