If writing a biography is difficult, writing a biography of someone deemed a ‘genius’ is positively perilous. The danger of producing hagiography is all too real, and all too familiar in the history ...

A great and subtle poet, a haughty and defensive noble, an enigmatic but reckless youth, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, blazed a trail through the reign of Henry VIII only to be executed for treason ...

‘Mindfulness’ is due a backlash, surely. And it starts here. Sort of. The authors, both psychologists, and one an experienced meditator with a lifelong interest in spiritual matters, originally set ...

Incredible but far from unusual is the story of Hercules’s maternal grandfather. Taken captive defending Kyiv from the ...

Frank Dikötter: Number Two Capitalist Roader - Deng Xiaoping: A Revolutionary Life by Alexander V Pantsov & Steven I Levine ...

Serial killers, convicted or alleged, undoubtedly exude a kind of corrupt majesty. Among them, for sheer originality and rather whiffy charisma, the modern emperor must be Jeffrey Dahmer. It was, of ...

In a popular American blog propagating Darwinism, Felipe Fernández-Armesto reports, a well-known biologist with mildly unorthodox views has been described as needing a ‘good punch in the balls’.

Laura Cumming’s wonderful, haunting new book slips between genres. It is not quite a memoir, not quite a biography and not straightforwardly an investigation into the past. But this ambiguity fits the ...

In his superb American Pastoral, Philip Roth displayed signs of wanting to examine his kind of people in greater philosophic depth: Swede Lermontov, a Newark Jew who has moved to the mink-and-manure ...

Just before Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Gestapo and ruler of Bohemia, was, as the Irish put it, shot off, Walter Frentz made a colour portrait photograph. Hitler, anticipating further staff losses ...

John Dee was the most famous scientist of the Elizabethan age. A great mathematician, he introduced Euclid to Englishmen; a brilliant cartographer, he was the guiding spirit behind the sea journeys ...

On Wednesday 28 January 1756, the Jamaican planter Thomas Thistlewood made a brief entry in his journal: ‘Had Derby well whipped, and made Egypt shit in his face.’ The punishment was not a one-off; ...