An ‘Arch-Mediocrity who presided rather than ruled’ over a ‘Cabinet of Mediocrities’ – Benjamin Disraeli’s sneering dismissal of Lord Liverpool, prime minister during the turbulent years from 1812 to ...

Emma Smith and Andrew McConnell Stott both introduce their books by acknowledging that not everyone enjoys Shakespeare. Smith announces at the start of This Is Shakespeare that she has written the ...

Keith Houston’s history of emojis reveals that explicit images as well as political provocations, flagrant brand ...

Some modern scholars believe these to be forgeries written later in antiquity, designed to give the otherwise shadowy figure ...

According to the American academic William Kelleher Storey, Rhodes was able to go a long way towards realising his vision ...

My Sister and Other Lovers by Esther Freud ...

Incredible but far from unusual is the story of Hercules’s maternal grandfather. Taken captive defending Kyiv from the ...

A New Biography of Lawrence Durrell, 1912–45 by Michael Haag; The Durrells: The Story of a Family by Richard Bradford ...

When I went up to Magdalene College, Cambridge, in 1960, freshmen (we were all men) were presented with a potted history of the place written almost forty years earlier by its then master, Arthur ...

This is a book about the ordinariness of George Orwell, which comes on the back of another book, edited by Nathan Waddell, about an Orwell so extraordinary that he warrants 848 pages to himself. In ...

US national security advisers come in all shapes and sizes. Few have had such a big an impact as Zbigniew Brzezinski, who wasn’t even an American until obtaining citizenship as an adult. Zbig, as ...