THE SCOPE OF contemporary US dominance is unparalleled in human history. America has 752 military facilities in 130 countries, some of them until recently part of the Soviet empire. What the American ...

EARLY ON IN this magnificent biography, Richard Thorpe reveals that Anthony Eden was rated last out of nineteen in a poll on British twentieth-century prime ministers. In a field populated by Neville ...

In her latest book, which tells the stories of three generations of women, and the men who love them, Penelope Lively presents us with a wholesome vision of England. It begins in 1935, when a ...

Were the Borgias the wickedest family in history? Certainly their Italian contemporaries depicted them as such, but many of the signorial families of the Italian Renaissance were as bad, if not worse, ...

This is a truly excellent book, one of the best it has been my pleasure to read in the line of duty for years. Joanne Harris achieves everything a novelist should aim for, with no sense of effort or ...

Do we experience life as a continuum or as a series of disconnected shocks and accidents? Alice Munro started writing at a time when novelists, at least, were preoccupied with coherence, with ...

In March 1942, while working in wartime London as assistant to the Director of Naval Intelligence, Lieutenant-Commander Ian Fleming proposed the creation of a tiny but dedicated front-line unit of ...

Born in Dublin, Iris Murdoch was brought up in England and took a degree in classics at Somerville College, Oxford, in 1942. After two years as an Assistant Principal at the Treasury, she worked for a ...

David Bentley Hart is an Eastern Orthodox theologian who has made waves in his own sphere through his radical atavism (he refers often to the early Church fathers’ concept of the divine), his sympathy ...

If you had been in the vicinity of the Turk’s Head Tavern on Soho’s Gerrard Street on a Friday evening in the second half of the 18th century, you might have recognised a number of famous men ...

This is not a book about Alexander Solzhenitsyn. It is the book. Previous studies, above all the monumental and patient work of Michael Scammell, 'will give you all the facts' – as biographies do in ...

In the long history of Western culture, it is given to very few to have an entire era named after them. Socrates sits within Antiquity, Leonardo da Vinci within the Renaissance; even Shakespeare has ...