‘In my belly is an octopus and in it are God’s children. Living children. These are things I must not speak of.’ These are the startling words of a German judge named Daniel Paul Schreber (1842–1911), ...

Good history opens up sightlines not only to the past but to the present as well. It allows us to see aspects of our current circumstance as the product of developments that are deeper and richer than ...

It is remarkable that, in the huge tide of material written on Hitler’s Third Reich over the past half-century, there has not been a single-volume history of the Reich’s economy in English (though ...

Laura Cumming’s wonderful, haunting new book slips between genres. It is not quite a memoir, not quite a biography and not straightforwardly an investigation into the past. But this ambiguity fits the ...

A missing-person case leads a nameless inspector into a shady underworld of corrupt corporations, random disappearances and duplicitous men in suits. So far, so noir. But as the narrator-inspector of ...

‘Hardly one of the irresistible poets’, was C S Lewis’s assessment of Thomas Wyatt. Other critics have tended to agree, treating him (and the Earl of Surrey, with whom he is frequently paired) as the ...

The image of the Viking warrior has long been a source of (sometimes guilty) fascination. Victorian intellectuals were eager to see in the Vikings a specifically northern inspiration for British ...

Axel Munthe’s memoirs, The Story of San Michele (1929), was one of the great bestsellers of the interwar years. Republished a dozen times in its first few months and translated into forty languages, ...

The thesis of Bernard Wasserstein’s huge new history of modern Europe is all there in the title. Two themes underlie this grandest of narratives: on the one hand, the astonishing advance of European ...

It seems amazing that this is the first major biography for almost thirty years of the man who gave definitive expression to the English experience of the First World War. It is, in fact, only the ...

The relationship between mother and daughter is probably the most insidious, powerful, elaborate and devastating connection known to woman. (It can, of course, alternatively be the most powerful, ...

If I want to walk along the river near where I live, I have to cross one of the busiest roads in west London. The only access is via an underpass, an enclosed tunnel where a female friend of mine was ...