In the Nancy Mitford novels there is a character called the Bolter. She is the narrator’s mother who lives in Kenya and parks her daughter on an unmarried aunt. She is always falling for unsuitable ...

While the process by which a person becomes part of a terrorist group is different in every case, there are patterns and similarities in the ways people are radicalised. Identifying them is a big part ...

Among the bombings that marked the beginning of 2017, one took place on New Year’s Day at the CasaPound bookshop in Florence, an outpost of the Italian neo-fascist or ‘alt-right’ CasaPound movement, ...

William Trevor, the much-admired writer of more than thirty novels and collections of short stories, died in 2016. He would have been ninety this year, and to remember and celebrate him this ...

Auguste Rodin ‘haunted’ (his word) the British Museum from the first of his many visits to London in 1881. He was aged forty-one, and already a lauded and successful sculptor, highly attuned to the ...

Beginnings is a truly remarkable work of criticism which, for some reason, has had far less than its due share of attention since appearing in 1975. Reviewers were probably bewildered, not only by the ...

A few years ago Mary Beard and Keith Hopkins wrote a fascinating book about that most famous monument of imperial Rome, the Colosseum. They asked just what exactly went on there. Now Mary Beard has ...

With Eisenhower’s armies closing in on Hitler’s Reich in the spring of 1945, Allied intelligence experts warned of a last-ditch stand by the Nazis in an Alpine redoubt and of a nationwide ‘Werewolf’ ...

In 1843, two years before her death at the age of seventy-two, Cassandra Austen told her brother Charles that she had been ‘looking over & destroying some of my Papers’, but was keeping ‘a few letters ...

The best way to enjoy Mozart & The Wolf Gang is to avoid making any attempt to categorise it. In essence, it is about musical aesthetics. Burgess begins with a conversation in heaven between Beethoven ...

Ugwu is a teenager from a village in Nigeria who goes to work as a houseboy for a university lecturer, Odenigbo. His aunt tells him that if he works hard, he will eat well. ‘You will even eat meat ...

In April 1591, six royal ships under the command of Lord Thomas Howard left Plymouth to intercept the annual Spanish flota, laden with New World treasure, off the Azores. Unfortunately for Howard, his ...