Marina Lewycka is one of those novelists whose reviews never quite reflect their huge popularity with actual readers. I managed to miss her bestselling A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian, but I ...

The existence of Fashion depends on people buying more clothes than they wear out. If a garment is replaced only when it is worn out there is no Fashion, if it is worn beyond its natural replacement ...

As India powers its way up the world GDP rankings, a case is being made for recasting its national history as ‘world history’. By looking beyond India’s boundaries and focusing on the global context ...

Last Summer I was briefly in Ponte da Barca, a small town in the valley of the river Lima, so far to the north of Portugal it is almost in Spain. Old buildings line the main street, and the great ...

Whether looking down from above or up from below, Napoleon must be well satisfied with the attention he has been receiving two hundred years after his fall. He has recently been the subject of new ...

In the long history of Western culture, it is given to very few to have an entire era named after them. Socrates sits within Antiquity, Leonardo da Vinci within the Renaissance; even Shakespeare has ...

In October 1726 some ‘strange, but well attested’ news emerged from Godalming near Guildford. An ‘eminent’ surgeon, a male midwife, had delivered a poor woman called Mary Toft not of a child but of ...

Corresponding with Bertrand Russell in 1922, Joseph Conrad confessed: ‘I have never been able to find in any man’s book or any man’s talk anything … to stand up for a moment against my deep-seated ...

The earthquake and tsunami in 2011, compounded by radiation contamination, were the most devastating catastrophes to strike Japan since the Second World War. Most cruelly, they hit Tōhoku, the ...

What is perhaps most striking about Tell Them of Battles, Kings and Elephants is its slightness. The latest work to appear in English by Mathias Enard – the heavily garlanded darling of French letters ...

History is accelerating, chiefly because the growth of knowledge is increasing exponentially, and knowledge is a powerful fuel. Travel, political decisions, the exchange of information, the inception ...

Why did the sheltered daughter of a Church of England minister, brought up to be deeply suspicious of Catholics, take the drastic step of walking into a Brussels church, finding a confessional and ...