Medieval Death, by art historian Paul Binski, makes a creditable stab at being three different books at once. First and most appealingly, it is a coffee-table book of death for the general reader. It ...

Do you know what happened in Lyon in AD 177? Or in Milan in 1300? Or in Baroda in 1825? You probably don’t, but you shouldn’t worry: few do. Whatever happened, it was, by ordinary standards, something ...

The Fifties and Sixties saw the last widespread revival of interest in Ronald Firbank. In 1958, Sandy Wilson premiered a musical based on Valmouth (1919; possibly the only novel in which a majority of ...

On an autumn day in 1680, the 50-year-old Charles II charged Samuel Pepys with an unusual task. Over two three-hour sittings, one on a Sunday evening, the next the following Tuesday morning, the king ...

At one point in Defining Hitler its author asks the reader the rhetorical question: why bother to read this book? For many writers this would be a merited act of authorial self-destruction. In Haffner ...

Death is the one promise life makes to us that it always keeps. From Homer, whose warriors at Troy are engulfed in the darkness of death, to Larkin glumly ‘going to the inevitable’, writers have shown ...

In any conversation about Will Self it is a fair bet that, to nods of assent, someone will remark: 'Of course, his stories are better than his novels.' I have been there and done that. I have made the ...

Pablo Larraín’s entertaining new film, Neruda, has come at a serendipitous moment. This year marks the hundredth anniversary of the founding of Editorial Nascimento, Pablo Neruda’s first publisher, ...

WHEN ARTHUR BRYANT presented the sanitised version of Lord Alanbrooke's diaries in the 1950s, he called the volume that culminated with El Alamein 'The Turn of the Tide'. Winston Churchill, in an ...

AT ONE OF the earliest points of our recorded history, the remarkable culture of Mesopotamia flourished, and one of its many versatile and precocious achievements was Gilgamesh, our first recognisable ...

Perhaps there once was a time when you could happily wet the bed, play with your faeces or your sister, barge into your parents bedroom without knocking and still grow up to be a relatively ...

David Bentley Hart is an Eastern Orthodox theologian who has made waves in his own sphere through his radical atavism (he refers often to the early Church fathers’ concept of the divine), his sympathy ...