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 ...

Despite the disasters at Three Mile Island in 1979, Chernobyl in 1986 and latterly Fukushima, we seem to be witnessing a global nuclear revival. The Chinese recently increased estimated new-build ...

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 ...

HAVING SERVED ONLY half of his four-year sentence for perjury, Jefrey Archer was released from prison last July. In celebration, Macmillan Audio Books is releasing freshly abridged titles. This one ...

Richard Holloway is the first mate who incites a mutiny, makes his fellow mutineers walk the plank, dynamites the scuppers, and takes to a lifeboat. His has been a difficult life for his shipmates.

WORDSWORTH DESCRIBED CHARLES Lamb and his older sister Mary as 'a double tree / with two collateral stems sprung from one root'. They were the most intimate of companions, apparently inseparable. 'As, ...

A few days after Christmas in 1817, the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon threw a dinner party for William Wordsworth, who was a great catch, and asked their common friend Charles Lamb to join them. He ...

Art history, among other histories, is being rewritten from a feminist perspective, for better and, sometimes, for worse. In Women Artists and the Pre-Raphaelite Movement, Jan Marsh and Pamela Gerrish ...

In his last travel book – though 'travel book' does not quite describe A Turn in the South – V S Naipaul spoke about a more conventional book, the sort many travellers write today and the sort of ...

Like a certain type of liberal, patrician British newspaper columnist, Professor John Mueller specialises in allaying fears deliberately sown among the credulous mob by sundry alarmists and ...

This is a truly excellent book, one of the best it has been my pleasure to read in the line of duty for years. Joanne Harris achieves everything a novelist should aim for, with no sense of effort or ...

Literary biographers like to make large claims for the importance of their genre. If we are to understand a writer’s work, they tell us (with varying degrees of hysteria), we must first arrive at an ...