‘The present is more and more the day of the hotel,’ declared Henry James in The American Scene. It still is. We are all hoteliers now, at least potentially. The private two-bed flat competes for ...

THIS SHORT BOOK attempts to diagnose the nature, the cause and the goal of anti-Western attitudes in the world today. Buruma and Margalit's primary target is the Islamist war on Western jahiliyya.

Over 150 years after her birth, 109 years after mounting the British throne alongside her husband, George V, sixty-six years after her death, Mary of Teck has gone viral. Until the publication last ...

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 ...

This year, in case you didn’t know it, is the tercentenary of Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown’s birth. He was the landscape designer who advised at some 250 estates in England and exerted almost a ...

In a story which depends heavily on architectural metaphor, the fissures that began to snake across the masonry of Gianlorenzo Bernini’s twin bell-towers at St Peter’s in Rome, even before they were ...

The Ten Thousand Things opens with a bookseller’s advertisement for itself, stating that it was translated from a manuscript rescued during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900. And it ends with two ‘imperial ...

Frances, the narrator of Conversations with Friends, is twenty-one and composes poetry by ‘hitting the return key whenever I wanted’. She spends most of her time with her charismatic ex-girlfriend, ...

Although larger than France and as populous as Spain, Ukraine has long been something of an empty space on the Western mental map. Living in the newly independent country in the early 1990s, I often ...

Gillian Tindall’s very enjoyable new book traces the associations of various members of her family with the old Latin Quarter of Paris. The story begins with her great-great-grandfather, Arthur Jacob, ...

The story that apparently inspired Barclay Price to write this book is of a Chinese man called William Macao who arrived in Britain in or around 1775 as a servant. Thanks to benign employers, he was ...

AT ONE OF the earliest points of our recorded history, the remarkable culture of Mesopotamia flourished, and one of its many versatile and precocious achievements was Gilgamesh, our first recognisable ...