I realised almost as soon as I began reading Norman Davies’s new history of the Second World War in Europe that I was not the best person to review it. In his introduction he says, without a blushing ...

Frank Dikötter: Number Two Capitalist Roader - Deng Xiaoping: A Revolutionary Life by Alexander V Pantsov & Steven I Levine ...

We people of the Anglosphere need to learn the peculiar use among German-speaking economists of the Latin word ordo (‘arrangement’), as in der Ordoliberalismus. The historian Quinn Slobodian’s ...

In Berlin at the end of the 1920s, a set of fake Van Goghs sent the art world reeling. The paintings had passed through the hands of Otto Wacker, an obscure Berlin art dealer, and had long been ...

David Bromwich’s The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke, published in 2014 as the first of two proposed volumes, turned out to be one of the most notable studies ever written of the great Irish ...

On an autumn day in 1680, the 50-year-old Charles II charged Samuel Pepys with an unusual task. Over two three-hour sittings, one on a Sunday evening, the next the following Tuesday morning, the king ...

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 ...

In the Nancy Mitford novels there is a character called the Bolter. She is the narrator’s mother who lives in Kenya and parks her daughter on an unmarried aunt. She is always falling for unsuitable ...

William Trevor, the much-admired writer of more than thirty novels and collections of short stories, died in 2016. He would have been ninety this year, and to remember and celebrate him this ...

Dorling Kindersley, otherwise known as DK, was one of the greatest publishing phenomena of recent times. Springing up from nothing in a back bedroom in Kennington in 1974, it was the brainchild of ...

In a popular American blog propagating Darwinism, Felipe Fernández-Armesto reports, a well-known biologist with mildly unorthodox views has been described as needing a ‘good punch in the balls’.

Clare Bucknell: Thinkers & Drinkers - The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age by Leo Damrosch ...