Denis Diderot, at Catherine the Great’s insistent invitation, spent the autumn and winter of 1773–4 in St Petersburg. It was the worst time of year for an ageing philosopher, underdressed, plagued by ...

It is one of the many contentions in this lively, provocative and indeed contentious book that the order to stop the German tanks in May 1940 before they reached Dunkirk can at last be explained ...

The title of Miranda Seymour’s vastly enjoyable new book is misleading. It suggests that Byron’s wife and daughter tumbled about in the slipstream of a volcanic genius. Yet although there was no ...

Hot on the heels of his massive Armageddon comes another blockbuster from Max Hastings, this time on the death throes of the predatory Japanese Empire, whose final agonies outlived those of Hitler’s ...

Donna Tartt likes to start her books with a death. In The Secret History (1992), the victim was a college student called Bunny. The prologue made it clear that our narrator had blood on his hands and ...

Back in the early 1980s, in the depths of an Oxford winter, I remember trudging through the snow to attend something called the New College Fiction Symposium – a kind of brains trust featuring ...

Wars displace people. The ‘exodus’ – the flight south in May and June 1940 of a good part of the population of northern France, including Paris – was remarkable. But it was not unique. Less than five ...

It isn’t too much of a spoiler, I hope, to say that Robert Harris’s enjoyable new book has a twist not at the end, but at the beginning: it starts out looking like a historical novel and, a chapter or ...

Professor Charles Esdaile, the author of an excellent history of the Peninsular War, has now followed it up with an even better history of the Napoleonic Wars from the breakdown of the Peace of Amiens ...

ONE OF STALIN'S closest colleagues in the turbulent years of the dictatorship, Lazar Kaganovich, once remarked that he had known many Stalins. This does not mean that Stalin had doubles everywhere ...

‘The whole point of this book’, the award-winning epidemiologist Professor Tim Spector informs readers of Spoon-Fed, ‘is not to tell you how or what to eat’ – a refreshing change for those who have to ...

Being a Peter Ackroyd ‘history’ or imaginative excursion down England’s most famous river, Sacred River is a book full of dreams and visions, whimsy and religiosity, and sometimes unfalsifiable and ...