Oh, I thought you were a man!” were the words uttered by the pioneering nuclear physicist Ernest Rutherford when he first met ...

I had always been faulty”, Tom Lee tells us halfway through this troubled memoir of his battle to remain on an even keel. The ...

In the late ninth century, an anonymous scribe in Aquitaine compiled a collection of thirty-one Latin poems. Among them is a ...

Frances Tanzer’s innovative and insightful approach to the postwar cultural reinvention of Vienna focuses on artists, ...

Nicola Shulman salutes the memoirs of an old-school editor and socialite; Rebecca Fraser discusses an unexpectedly peaceful transition of power in seventeenth-century America Toby Lichtig travels to ...

In an essay of 1946, George Orwell reminded readers that “to see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle”. In their complementary new books on the shadow global economy, the ...

Does the term “South Sea Annuity” ring a bell? There is no reason why it should. It is a recondite feature of eighteenth-century government finances, when Britain, engaged in the “Second Hundred Years ...

440pp. Princeton University Press. £35 (US $39.95). Stephanie Sandler “The plot always thickens in winter / All roads lead right to it”, says a voice in Maria Stepanova’s book-length poem Holy Winter ...

What a peculiar book this is. Peter York, best known for his cod-anthropological examin­ation of British society’s various snobby tribes, The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook (1982), has turned his ...

Most of us would rather not think about death – our own or that of others. It is one of the most invisible, suppressed, negated and denied facts of life. Yet it will eventually and inevitably catch up ...

The 250th anniversary of the death of Oliver Goldsmith at the age of forty-five passed last year with little comment or commemoration. But at Trinity College Dublin and the Irish embassy in London, ...

Does it matter who wrote the books we love? I was recently asked to talk about Elsa Morante (1912–85) at the Italian Cultural Institute in London. The idea was to present her fiction in a celebration ...