Alison Moore’s The Lighthouse was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Her novels deal with the nightmarish and the claustrophobic. Her most recent, Missing, teetered on the edge of the supernatural.

What a difference a decade makes. In 1940 George Orwell published his eighth book, the essay collection Inside the Whale, but when the Nazis in the same year drew up a list of Britons to be arrested ...

Stephan Thernstrom, 56, a professor at Harvard University for 25 years, is considered one of the pre-eminent scholars of the history of race relations in America. He has tenure. He has won prizes and ...

Denis Diderot, at Catherine the Great’s insistent invitation, spent the autumn and winter of 1773–4 in St Petersburg. It was the worst time of year for an ageing philosopher, underdressed, plagued by ...

Protect them Lord in all their fights, And, even more, protect the whites. (From ‘In Westminster Abbey’) Historians of the Second World War have increasingly seen it as a gigantic showdown between the ...

A C Grayling has carved out a niche not only as a lucid and accessible interpreter of philosophy for the general reader but also as a passionate advocate for the role that it can and should play in ...

That rough beast the Great American Novel has been slouching around since the 19th century in the form of hefty books by male authors, from Melville and Hemingway to Franzen and DeLillo. It’s always ...

The blurb of The Famine Plot claims that Tim Pat Coogan is Ireland’s leading historian. This is not exactly right, but it is true that Coogan’s works sell widely and have a significant influence both ...

The sky was as black as ink and we could scarcely see the lights of the disappearing port. A chill, damp wind whistled, yet we felt stifled by the heavy rain clouds above us. The crew had trooped onto ...

Chil Rajchman was one of only a handful to survive Treblinka. Unlike Auschwitz, Treblinka was purely an extermination camp, where the only Jews not immediately gassed were Sonderkommandos employed in ...

On 20 April 1912, a 64-year-old writer and retired theatre manager named Abraham Stoker died quietly at his home in St George’s Square, London. The Times was one of the few major newspapers to carry ...

‘The whole point of this book’, the award-winning epidemiologist Professor Tim Spector informs readers of Spoon-Fed, ‘is not to tell you how or what to eat’ – a refreshing change for those who have to ...