In 1843, two years before her death at the age of seventy-two, Cassandra Austen told her brother Charles that she had been ‘looking over & destroying some of my Papers’, but was keeping ‘a few letters ...

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

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

When in 1960 I first came across Osip Mandelstam’s poetry, nobody in the USSR had enjoyed access to his work since the early 1930s and few even knew of his existence, let alone of his death, as he had ...

In March 1941, Labour Monthly, the semi-official magazine of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), published an apology for a recent review of The English Revolution, 1640 by the up-and-coming ...

Does the misuse of the word ‘literally’ make your toes curl? Do the vocal tics of young ’uns set you worrying about the decline of the noble English language? You are not alone. But your fears are ...

On the evening of 13 December 2003, nine months after the invasion of Iraq, a combat team from the US 4th Infantry Division arrived at a small farmhouse by the River Tigris, north of Baghdad. Soldiers ...

Emma Smith: What Is She Reading?During lockdown, a Twitter account called Bookcase Credibility (bio: ‘What you say is not as important as the bookcase behind you’) gathered a hundred thousand ...

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

A divorcee in her sixties named Rose travels to Almería to see a specialist, who may or may not be a quack, about a mystery ailment that may or may not be imagined. She is accompanied by her daughter, ...

Are the Baltic Sea states, as former Estonian president Lennart Meri once put it, the factory of Europe’s future? Oliver Moody’s brilliantly written, convincingly argued and compelling book makes a ...

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