DAVID PEACE BEGAN the first novel of his acclaimed Red Riding Quartet, about the Ripper killings and other grim goings-on in Yorkshire in the 1970s and 1980s, with a quotation from Harry S Truman: ...

I’m not sure what stands out for you when you think of the late 1990s – DeLillo’s Underworld? The dot-com bubble? Titanic? – but for me it’s two things: working (somewhat reluctantly) in New Age ...

Sir James Stirling was and still is the central figure in postwar British and possibly world architecture. He was the godfather to the high-tech generation of Richard Rogers and Norman Foster as well ...

The misleading title of Tom Fort’s new book gives the impression that it’s yet another exposé of village life by an incomer who has found it – surprise, surprise – less than idyllic. But in reality ...

Protect them Lord in all their fights, And, even more, protect the whites. (From ‘In Westminster Abbey’) Historians of the Second World War have increasingly seen it as a gigantic showdown between the ...

The youngest of three brothers who became highly distinctive writers in the early decades of the last century, Llewelyn Powys is today the least read. This is surprising, since in some ways he is now ...

Could we be about to witness a Matthew Arnold revival after years of disparagement of his poetry by T S Eliot and those who came after him? The multiplicity of popular editions indicates that the ...

In just thirteen years, George Villiers rose from plain squire to become the only duke in England and the most powerful politician in the land. Does a new biography finally unravel the secrets of his ...

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more. The production and export of cars, machinery and chemicals lay behind the German ‘economic miracle’ of the ...

The days when LSD made headlines as ‘The Most Dangerous Thing Since the Atom Bomb’ are long gone; now we’re in a ‘Psychedelic Renaissance’, with Prince Harry drinking ayahuasca tea and Mike Tyson ...

The architectural destruction of British cities in the middle forty years of the twentieth century – from about 1930 to 1970 – is not paralleled elsewhere in Europe, nor can it be entirely explained ...

History is accelerating, chiefly because the growth of knowledge is increasing exponentially, and knowledge is a powerful fuel. Travel, political decisions, the exchange of information, the inception ...