Unlike Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping did not pretend to be a poet, a philosopher or a calligrapher. The Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping, in a mere three volumes, offer few hints about the person himself.

Gertrude Himmelfarb is a valuable piece on the intellectual chessboard. Unlike most historians of ideas, she discusses her concepts against a firm historical background, in the light of the ...

WORDSWORTH DESCRIBED CHARLES Lamb and his older sister Mary as 'a double tree / with two collateral stems sprung from one root'. They were the most intimate of companions, apparently inseparable. 'As, ...

In his last travel book – though 'travel book' does not quite describe A Turn in the South – V S Naipaul spoke about a more conventional book, the sort many travellers write today and the sort of ...

A few days after Christmas in 1817, the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon threw a dinner party for William Wordsworth, who was a great catch, and asked their common friend Charles Lamb to join them. He ...

The fifties was the great decade of radio soap-opera. I myself am always very mindful of this aspect of the period since my own godmother devised and was the principal coordinating scriptwriter of Mrs ...

Art history, among other histories, is being rewritten from a feminist perspective, for better and, sometimes, for worse. In Women Artists and the Pre-Raphaelite Movement, Jan Marsh and Pamela Gerrish ...

Like a certain type of liberal, patrician British newspaper columnist, Professor John Mueller specialises in allaying fears deliberately sown among the credulous mob by sundry alarmists and ...

Consider Hugh Trevor-Roper’s description in The Mind of Adolf Hitler of the European cultural order we would have grown up with if the Panzers had prevailed in 1945 ...

It is hard to understand why the reign of Henry VII has for so long had the reputation of being one of the most boring periods of English history. Perhaps it is because successive generations of ...

Andrew Miller is a paradoxical novelist. He writes eloquently about isolation in a way that feels modern and relevant, and yet, more often than not, he dips into the past in order to do so. He does it ...

Sir Ian Kershaw has emerged, rather surprisingly, as a towering figure amongst historians of modern Germany. Surprisingly, because he began his career as a medievalist whose focus was Bolton Priory in ...