Simon Schama is a professional historian who teaches at Harvard University. He is also a popular historian, whose 1983 book about the French Revolution, Citizens, became a well-deserved bestseller.

No doubt I will not be the last to remark that this is the most fascinating book Patrick McGrath did not write. It has all the ingredients of one of McGrath’s icily stylish novels: madness, violence, ...

A few days after Christmas in 1817, the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon threw a dinner party for William Wordsworth, who was a great catch, and asked their common friend Charles Lamb to join them. He ...

In ‘Burnt Norton’, T S Eliot tells us that 'human kind / Cannot bear very much reality'. You could say the same thing about eighteenth-century verse with more justice. The Augustans could bear much ...

That episode is pivotal in Liaquat Ahamed’s panorama of the origins of an era of deflation, stagnation and unrest – the ‘first Great Depression’ – that afflicted much of the world for the rest of the ...

Taller with the Charm On - The People’s Emperor: The Unlikely Rise and Spectacular Fall of Napoleon III by Edward Shawcross ...

For many, what would come to be known as Christianity was still a Jewish sect operating within the confines of the established Law (ie the teachings of the Torah). Yet Christianity was cosmopolitan ...

Reports from Cuba by J S Tennant ...

The Partisan Life of Abraham Lincoln by Matthew Pinsker ...

Six of the Best - The Nord Stream Conspiracy: The Inside Story of the Explosions that Shook the World by Bojan Pancevski ...

Ever since Shakespeare labelled Richard, Duke of Gloucester, a ‘murderous Machiavel’, the word ‘Machiavellian’ in popular culture has meant being devious, cunning, scheming and quite prepared for the ...

Few people can have had more fun than Peter Lennon, working for an English newspaper in Paris. Lennon arrived in Paris from Dublin in approximately 1960, aged about twenty, and stayed for roughly ten ...