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 ...

‘Your immortal soul!’ my father used to shout, brandishing his fist. His lament was also a threat – to me, his teenage daughter, that I stood to lose my soul if I lost my Catholic faith. Nowadays, of ...

In June 1941 I happened to be in, of all places, Palestine, flying with the RAF against the Vichy French and the Nazis. Hitler happened to be in Germany and the gas-chambers were being built and the ...

Wolfgang Münchau has, for more than thirty years, been one of the most acute and penetrating commentators on the European Union, writing in the Financial Times, the New Statesman and elsewhere. What I ...

The desires of diarists, to paraphrase Lytton Strachey, are wonderfully various. They can be motivated by Schadenfreude, reportage, self-defence or simple record-keeping. Most diaries are destined ...

Prince Albert has been the subject of numerous biographies, beginning with Sir Theodore Martin’s five-volume ‘Albertiad’ (as A N Wilson describes it) of 1875 to 1880. Martin was, however, hampered by ...

Fantasy benders. This is what the unnamed protagonist of Miranda July’s second novel, All Fours, calls her mental flights into weird, funny and often erotic alternate realities. ‘You can’t have ...

In late 2022, at the G20 summit held at a balmy resort in Bali, Indonesia, the prime minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, bumped into the supreme leader of China, Xi Jinping. The encounter, which was ...

Who among us can say we have never wondered what it would be like to enter the world of a favourite book? Sam Mills has certainly thought about it. She describes her first novel for adults, The ...

This is a timely book. It reminds us of a particularly shameful moment in our modern history, when fascism, despite having just been defeated in a war in which millions lost their lives, once more ...

No one in Renaissance Florence could resist Girolamo Savonarola’s voice. An austere, forbidding Dominican friar, he had come to dominate city life long before the Medici were swept from power. Huge ...

As E H Carr famously noted, ‘studying the historian’ is key to understanding how history is written. This is especially true when it comes to the debate over the origins of the First World War, a ...