Unconventional lives can tell us much about the conventions and social currents of their times. Susannah Stapleton’s compulsively absorbing book about Maud West centres on a woman who was a splendid ...

Best-selling author Robert Lacey begins his fascinating history with Cheddar Man, who lived 9,000 years ago when England was still joined to Europe. He ends with the discovery of DNA and thus creates ...

In this difficult-to-classify book, Ian Sansom – best known for his mystery novels, which I’ve read and enjoyed – rambles through (or beside) one of the great modern poems: ‘September 1, 1939’ by W H ...

In A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain Owen Hatherley cast his exhilaratingly miserabilist eye over the Blair era’s ‘regeneration’ of cities such as Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham and Cardiff ...

With close to five hundred records relating to his life surviving and the prospect of still more being found, Geoffrey Chaucer remains one of the best-documented premodern Britons. The commanding size ...

Thomas W Hodgkinson: There Was No Sorcerer - Box Office Poison: Hollywood’s Story in a Century of Flops by Tim Robey Thomas W Hodgkinson - There Was No Sorcerer Thomas W Hodgkinson: There Was No ...

Everything about this book suggests it is much more the biography of a celebrity than an author. An international aristocracy of writers, artists, photographers and politicians flits through its pages ...

JOHN CAMPBELL CONCLUDES his monumental biography of twentieth-century Britain's greatest peacetime prime minister with the Latin tag: Si monumentum requiris, circumspice. Margaret Thatcher's eleven ...

Today, much of the popular discourse on the Vikings tends to be directed towards the rehabilitation of medieval Europe’s northerly inhabitants as respectable people. In Laughing Shall I Die, Tom ...

‘Biography’, contended the Tudor historian Geoffrey Elton, ‘is a poor way of writing history’. He believed that ‘no individual has ever dominated his age to the point where it becomes sensible to ...

Have you forgotten Ethelbreth? Do you have difficulty remembering dates? Do you find television historians interesting in any way? Do you feel sluggish? Do you feel postmodernism has lost the plot? If ...

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 ...