Fanny Duberly was the horse-loving wife of a Victorian cavalry officer. When the Crimean War broke out in 1854 she was twenty-six, cheerful, childless and strong-minded. She was among the handful of ...

This curious novel, Cornelius Medvei’s third, purports to be a political biography detailing the life of Mr Bolsover, a man who has ‘passed into folklore’, who either died in a ‘hail of bullets’ or ...

Robert Harris’s new historical-fictional foray delves into the early career and meteoric rise of Marcus Tullius Cicero, whose surname derives from the Latin for ‘chickpea’, as he entertainingly tells ...

For those of us who lead lives of quiet desperation this book puts matters into perspective. The journalist Peter Zimonjic was on one of the three Tube trains – a bus was also blown up – bombed on 7 ...

In 1939 and for at least the next fifteen years, Peter Fleming was much more successful and famous than his younger brother Ian. He was known as an explorer and adventurer, wrote bestselling books and ...

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 ...

Johnsey Cunliffe is a young Tipperary man with a disability that has rendered him somewhat lumbering and, in everyone’s estimation (including his own), simple. Despite this, the third-person narrative ...

Mary Kenny’s essential thesis in this thoughtful book is that popular Irish attitudes to the British monarchy, while formally based on the acceptance of a radical republican repudiation of the Crown ...

IN JANUARY 1940 the Chef of the Imperial General Staff, General Sir Edmund Ironside, recorded his impressions of the French army after a tour of inspection. In his diary he wrote, 'I say to myself ...

The title of Jérôme Ferrari’s newly translated novel, which won the 2012 Prix Goncourt, refers to the sermon St Augustine delivered after the sacking of Rome by the Visigoth leader Alaric in 410.

Historians of Restoration London know John Ogilby (c 1600–1676) for the marvellous post-Fire survey of the capital that he produced with his step-grandson, William Morgan, which was published in 1677; ...

Twenty years ago, in A Single Man, Christopher Isherwood gave an account of a teacher's day which, although marred by its mawkish memories of the hero's dead lover, remains both extremely funny as ...