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 ...

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

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

As Dorothy Rowe’s classic study My Dearest Enemy, My Dangerous Friend explains, sibling relationships – invariably intense, often fraught – are among the most underexamined of familial connections.

Fragments of pottery excavated in Poland tell us that around seven thousand years ago Neolithic farmers were transforming milk from sheep, cattle and goats into a solid food that could feed them in ...

Johnsey Cunliffe is a young Tipperary man with a disability that has rendered him somewhat lumbering and, in everyone’s estimation (including his own), simple. Despite this, the third-person narrative ...

Medical writing about the mind and brain is in rude health. Sigmund Freud was its first successful modern exponent, though his writing sometimes strayed too far towards imaginative literature. Like ...

In late 2022, at the G20 summit held at a balmy resort in Bali, Indonesia, the prime minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, bumped into the supreme leader of China, Xi Jinping. The encounter, which was ...

During the Cold War, 260,000 lightweight copies of Animal Farm floated into eastern Europe, carried by balloons. They were part of the CIA’s huge covert operation to slip ‘cultural enlightenment’ ...

My Sister and Other Lovers by Esther Freud ...

The Remigia cave, about eighty miles north of Valencia, features paintings dating from around 6500 BC. Some depict bands of archers hunting ibex; others appear to show executions. These are the ones ...

The artworks sometimes called ‘gold-ground paintings’ or, much worse, ‘Italian primitives’ are normally the preserve of academic research and rarely the subject of exhibitions. The exhibition ‘Siena: ...