There is something magnificent about the ambition of Iain McGilchrist’s book. It offers nothing less than an account of human nature and Western civilisation as outcomes of the competition between the ...

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 ...

The mystery of Agatha Christie's extraordinary appeal is the subject for investigation in this engaging study by Robert Barnard, and by the end of the book you should be a lot clearer about the ...

Only a selection of our reviews and articles are free. Subscribers receive the monthly magazine and access to all articles on our website. In the nine centuries since his death, El Cid has been ...

JOHN BIERMAN IS a journalist and military historian with a knack for turning complicated events into gripping narratives. His short biography of the Hungarian explorer Laszlo Almasy is no exception.

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 ...

A FEW YEARS ago, I mentioned to a London Jewish friend that I was writing an article about the Irish diaspora. ‘Diaspora?’ he shouted. ‘We’re the ones with the diaspora. Is there nothing the bloody ...

This single volume represents all the surviving 31,000 lines of Old English poetry in translation. It’s a big book, but this is a virtue, and it will be very handy for scholars and students. Although ...

Even in the company of her peers – Queen Elizabeth I of England, Queen Christiana of Sweden, the empress Maria Theresa – Catherine the Great stands out as an empire-builder, a larger-than-life, ...

The present border in Ireland is geographically arbitrary but not accidental. Historically, the province of Ulster comprised nine counties, but in the early 20th century, as clamour for Irish ...

‘The days are days of shaking’, declared the preacher Jeremiah Whittaker in an anxious sermon before the House of Commons in 1643; ‘days of trouble, rebuke and blasphemy’. And, he might have added, ...

As I see it, the argument of this most interesting, readable and generously provocative book is more or less as follows: the British, in the course of consolidating their worldwide empire during the ...