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 ...

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 ...

THE SPANISH CONQUEST of the Indies was one of the most important events in history, leaving an ineffaceable impression on global politics, language and culture. Yet among English speakers it is a ...

Remarkable polymath though he was, Pavel Florensky should not, perhaps, be compared to Leonardo da Vinci. For one thing, he had no patron: Stalin, unlike Cesare Borgia or King Francis I, preferred to ...

Maggie O’Farrell’s fifth novel, The Hand that First Held Mine, confronts the difficulties and wonders of motherhood. Through the lives of two women, Lexie and Elina, living a generation apart, a story ...

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 ...

Reviewers may be daunted by a book’s erudition, but it is rare to feel intimidated by the violence of the language. Chris Bryant’s Entitled is disturbing partly because it is written in a ...