‘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 ...

Nadine Gordimer is one of the great figures of our time. A political activist and excoriating critic in apartheid-era South Africa, she has more recently campaigned for social justice and AIDS ...

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 ...

This is a strange book, written with considerable charm and plenty of gorgeous detail, but difficult in many ways to get a handle on. The life referred to in the title is not Philip Hensher’s own, but ...

Thomas Cromwell has lately been enjoying a renaissance. Prior to 2009, if people had heard of him at all, they most likely thought of the brutish and cynical fixer in Robert Bolt’s play A Man for All ...

Book Reviews by subject: 16th Century & Tudors & Family History April 2022 Issue Mathew Lyons They Courted Trouble The House of Dudley: The Fall of England’s Most Scandalous Family By Joanne Paul LR ...

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 ...

Michel Pastoureau began his wonderful and widely translated series on the history of colours with Blue a quarter of a century ago. Black, Green, Red, Yellow and White followed and now here is a ...

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 ...

Edward I and his first queen, Eleanor of Castile, were at the sharp end of medieval infant mortality statistics. Eleanor gave birth to at least fourteen children, only to see five of her daughters die ...

I realised almost as soon as I began reading Norman Davies’s new history of the Second World War in Europe that I was not the best person to review it. In his introduction he says, without a blushing ...

Seán Williams: Don’t Call It Wild SwimmingSwitzerland’s landscape is as much a place of freshwater troughs as it is of picture-postcard Alpine peaks, so much so that splashing about in lakes and ...