Good history opens up sightlines not only to the past but to the present as well. It allows us to see aspects of our current circumstance as the product of developments that are deeper and richer than ...

‘Was it mere coincidence that liberal secularism developed in the Christian west?’ With this rhetorical question, Larry Siedentop begins one of the most stimulating books of political theory to have ...

Neville Chamberlain was nothing if not a diligent correspondent. Every week he wrote to his sisters Ida and Hilda letters that were in effect a diary of everything he was doing politically. They have ...

Forgive me if I sound a bit fractious, a little staccato this month; the imminent arrival of the Academy Club downstairs has subjected us to long weeks of shuddering floors and dull reverberating ...

Steve Richards’s new book is an engaging survey of modern prime ministers. These leaders – from Harold Wilson to Theresa May, whose defenestration is alluded to in skilful late additions – qualify as ...

THERE ARE SOME books which condemn a man more by praising him than by attacking him. Bernard-Henri Livy's biography of Jean-Paul Sartre combines an irritating pseudy style - most of the book is not ...

Six pages into Eileen, Ottessa Moshfegh’s narrator-protagonist declares, ‘this isn’t a story of how awful my father was.’ This is not strictly true. Sixty-seven pages later his awfulness is still ...

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more. Russia’s recent efforts to destabilise the Baltic states have increased enthusiasm for the EU in these ...

With The Real Lolita, Sarah Weinman might be said to have invented a completely new genre: true-crime literary criticism, which is not to be confused with truly criminal literary criticism, which, of ...

A well-thumbed copy of 1066 and All That fixed some matters in my memory more firmly than the rather less frequented pages of Oman. Guido Morselli’s Past Conditional may turn the history of the First ...

‘It is difficult/to get the news from poems/yet men die miserably every day/for lack/of what is found there,’ wrote William Carlos Williams. Debates about poetry have a habit of standing in for larger ...

What is fiction to do with a world in which intimate human connection is increasingly mediated – or even replaced – by images on screens? Dream Sequence, the fourth novel by Adam Foulds, is the story ...