Throughout his long career Francis Walsingham dedicated himself to identifying and eradicating his country’s internal and external enemies. This grim ideologue is hardly the most sympathetic character ...

Ian Kershaw enters a crowded field with To Hell and Back, the first instalment of a two-volume history of Europe’s horrendous 20th century. Anyone interested in the period already has a formidable ...

When I was young, England was a much odder country than it seems today, and every now and then – much to the delight of its inhabitants – its oddity was celebrated in print by some fond but puzzled ...

‘This is the story of two middle-class families’, a prefatory note to All Our Yesterdays tells us; two families, it goes on, that suffer the ‘impact of Mussolini’s fascism’. It is also a ‘simple story ...

There is now a thriving C S Lewis industry. It would be very surprising if this were the only book about Lewis to appear this year. Of course, there is also something of an A N Wilson industry. It ...

Publishers have a big problem with feminism. Editors tend to subscribe to the notion that feminists are dreary and not to be bothered with, but every now and then a feminist book is a spectacular (and ...

Terry Eagleton: Supermarket of the Mind - The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act by Fredric Jameson ...

Tom Stern: Ecce Homunculus - The Making of Friedrich Nietzsche: The Quest for Identity, 1844–1869 by Daniel Blue ...

At one point in Defining Hitler its author asks the reader the rhetorical question: why bother to read this book? For many writers this would be a merited act of authorial self-destruction. In Haffner ...

If novels are going to be as rich in reference as Hilary Mantel’s Fludd, I do think the publishers should be encouraged to add optional reading lists at the end. Fludd is a funny, exquisitely written ...

‘My supreme idea is to get on’, wrote the young David Lloyd George to his sweetheart, Margaret Owen, during their prolonged courtship. Ominously, he added: ‘I am prepared to thrust even love itself ...

John Gray: Mind the Gap - The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures by Antonio Damasio ...