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 ...

Christopher Marlowe is having a moment. In London’s West End, the Royal Shakespeare Company is staging Born with Teeth, a new play by Liz Duffy Adams that imagines the erotic tension crackling between ...

What do we think of when we think of blondes? Perhaps Scandinavia, where blonde hair is commonplace, or iconic blonde stars such as Marilyn Monroe or Brigitte Bardot. Sexy Swedes, brash Americans or ...

Countless people have flourished throughout the history of mankind, only to vanish without trace. In Brazil alone, at least fifty tribes of Indians disappeared during the last century as their lands ...

For those of us who lead lives of quiet desperation this book puts matters into perspective. The journalist Peter Zimonjic was on one of the three Tube trains – a bus was also blown up – bombed on 7 ...

Why would you enjoy watching a man being hacked to death in front of you? As a student of the classics, this is one of the questions I always found difficult to answer. What was it that drew the ...

John Singer Sargent was born in Florence to peripatetic American parents and trained in Paris in the atelier of Carolus-­Duran. He made his artistic debut at the Salon of 1877 with a portrait of his ...

In March 1941, Labour Monthly, the semi-official magazine of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), published an apology for a recent review of The English Revolution, 1640 by the up-and-coming ...

The Murderess was first published in 1902 (this translation by Peter Levi appeared in 1983), and is widely acknowledged to be the masterpiece of Greek novelist Alexandros Papadiamantis. It is a sad ...

Are the Baltic Sea states, as former Estonian president Lennart Meri once put it, the factory of Europe’s future? Oliver Moody’s brilliantly written, convincingly argued and compelling book makes a ...

After producing two superb collections of short stories, Sweet Home and Dance Move, the Belfast-based writer Wendy Erskine has a lot to live up to in The Benefactors, her debut novel. The good news is ...

Looking at the triumphs and turpitude of the modern world, the temptation is always to seek someone responsible. In 1900, succumbing to that temptation, Mark Twain pointed to the 15th-century German ...