Robert Skidelsky is a distinguished economic and political historian whose first books were published in the 1960s. Many decades (and volumes) later, he has turned to giving us a warning from history ...

One of Katherine Mansfield’s defining characteristics was her restlessness, both personal and artistic: she was always most at home when on the move. ‘Do other artists feel as I do,’ she wondered, ...

Box Office Poison: Hollywood’s Story in a Century of Flops by Tim Robey ...

How can one measure the spirit of an age? Writing in 1963, the historian Harry Hopkins suggested that although the English still consumed much more suet pudding than apple strudel, for students of ...

A mountain of historical studies testifies to enduring interest in the American Civil War, a conflict still politically relevant in a nation riven over how to remember it. Those doubting that there is ...

David Goodhart has long been interested in a particularly acute set of modern dilemmas: commitment or exit; staying or moving; community or market. He has already added ‘somewhere or anywhere’ to that ...

The event most frequently connected with Herod the Great in popular culture, the Massacre of the Innocents, almost certainly never happened. In his gospel, where the event is described, St Matthew ...

Half a century ago Oliver Reed and Kate Millett each had a career-defining moment involving D H Lawrence: Reed when he played Gerald in Ken Russell’s 1969 film adaptation of Women in Love, with its ...

Jonathan Coe’s latest book turns out to be a bag of tricks, but it starts sedately enough. Phyl, a recent English graduate, is back living with her parents, Joanna and Andrew, making puns about ...

Close by the desk on which I write, I have some pieces of Tibet, a collection of ordinary stones picked up at various places thirty years ago on my one and only visit there. They are each wrapped in ...

So momentous an event was the French Revolution, so labyrinthine its evolution and so far-reaching its consequences for the whole of Europe that it seems the purest folly to imagine that anything ...

How did we get where we are, we human freaks of nature? Language, rational thought, art, science and technology set us apart from other species. Add to that list (more curse than accomplishment) an ...