Ever since Shakespeare labelled Richard, Duke of Gloucester, a ‘murderous Machiavel’, the word ‘Machiavellian’ in popular culture has meant being devious, cunning, scheming and quite prepared for the ...

This is the story of two crimes. The first was the bombing by the IRA of two pubs in Guildford in October 1974. Five people were killed, and many others horribly injured. The indiscriminate slaughter ...

David Bromwich’s The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke, published in 2014 as the first of two proposed volumes, turned out to be one of the most notable studies ever written of the great Irish ...

Auguste Rodin ‘haunted’ (his word) the British Museum from the first of his many visits to London in 1881. He was aged forty-one, and already a lauded and successful sculptor, highly attuned to the ...

We people of the Anglosphere need to learn the peculiar use among German-speaking economists of the Latin word ordo (‘arrangement’), as in der Ordoliberalismus. The historian Quinn Slobodian’s ...

The opening premise of Tim Blanning’s attractive book is that there were three revolutions at the turn of the nineteenth century. More or less simultaneously, the Europeanised world experienced a ...

In June 1941 I happened to be in, of all places, Palestine, flying with the RAF against the Vichy French and the Nazis. Hitler happened to be in Germany and the gas-chambers were being built and the ...

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 ...

In her second novel, Mary Lawson returns to the fictional setting of her first – Crow Lake. The lake, in the far north of Canada, proves an apt metaphor for her narrative: ‘the silvery ever-moving ...

It is a paradox that the legend of the Foreign Legion should have such international currency and that, in this country at least, it should rest on a deeply ambiguous adventure and mystery novel, P C ...

Fifty years ago, Father Francis Shaw, a professor of history at University College, Dublin, was asked to contribute an essay to the spring 1966 issue of Studies, an Irish Jesuit journal. The edition ...

Reconstruction of the past can rarely be complete. While the physical surroundings and style of a period can be invoked, we can never reconstruct how exactly people feel or think at a given moment. I ...