War reporters come in many types and guises (and degrees of honesty). John Hersey was at the peak of the profession during the Second World War, rivalled among Americans only by the GIs’ own ...

It’s curious how often a militant commitment to humanity goes with a deep dislike for the human animal. Joseph Conrad wrote that while H G Wells wanted to improve human beings but didn’t care for them ...

The writer Kate Summerscale has an enviable nose for events, once briefly notorious, that are still singular and disturbing, and often riven with ambiguities. She sweeps out forgotten, often violent ...

Basil Cheesman Bunting was one of literature’s great dodgers. A Northumbrian Quaker, he was born in 1900 and enjoyed a largely undocumented childhood before registering as a conscientious objector in ...

It has done no favours to the modern reputation of King Frederick II of Prussia – ‘Frederick the Great’ – that Hitler, during the mad final days of the Third Reich, placed the monarch’s portrait above ...

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 ...

The central action of Wendy Moore’s startlingly curious book takes place over a single year at the beginning of the reign of Queen Victoria. As a contemporary journalist put it, ‘There is no chapter ...

The camera pans across the Alps. The place: the St Gotthard Pass. The time: the winter of 1871 – February, to be precise. Trim sleighs skim through the snows, each holding two bundled-up passengers.

‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’ is one of those well-known phrases whose deeper significance is strangely elusive. I first heard it as a child, while living in what was then called Tanganyika in the ...

If you had been in the vicinity of the Turk’s Head Tavern on Soho’s Gerrard Street on a Friday evening in the second half of the 18th century, you might have recognised a number of famous men ...

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 ...

Imagine a man in late middle age, fastidiously dressed, his long face ‘creased and dry’, his ‘chameleon-like’ eyes watching behind round glasses. Picture him walking the streets of old Alexandria, ...