Seven years ago, Yuval Noah Harari was a little-known lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, specialising in world, medieval and military history. Then, almost out of nowhere, he published ...

Enoch Powell was the quintessential clever fool. As a classical scholar and a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, he displayed dazzling intellectual gifts; in 1938, at the age of twenty-five, he ...

'Piecemeal the body dies,’ wrote D H Lawrence in ‘The Ship of Death’, ‘and the timid soul/has her footing washed away, as the dark flood rises.’ Lawrence was dying prematurely from tuberculosis, but ...

In the 1970s, as feminism burst onto the stage, theorists and activists struggled to make sense of the ways in which patriarchal attitudes lived inside us and had constructed us as girls and boys, ...

When asked in 1972 about the significance of the French Revolution, Chinese premier Zhou Enlai reportedly quipped, ‘It’s too soon to tell.’ But while the meaning of the revolution in France could ...

It is a telling irony that a historical novel could be the quintessential literary work of the post-truth era. Perhaps no other novel better captures the malleability of truth than The Mirror and the ...

Sometime in the mid-1970s, I went to a party in Tina Brown’s rooms in Bloomsbury, and was introduced to Alexander Chancellor. I was then working for the New Statesman, correctly recollected in this ...

Johnsey Cunliffe is a young Tipperary man with a disability that has rendered him somewhat lumbering and, in everyone’s estimation (including his own), simple. Despite this, the third-person narrative ...

Stephen Greenblatt’s ardent and involving new book is concerned with rulers and aspirants in Shakespeare who abuse their power. It draws attention to a very wide range of characters. There are the out ...

Thomas Cromwell has lately been enjoying a renaissance. Prior to 2009, if people had heard of him at all, they most likely thought of the brutish and cynical fixer in Robert Bolt’s play A Man for All ...

‘The Infant Modernists’ is one of the great unwritten works of critical biography. Shiningly specific childhood experience, the oeuvres of Woolf, Joyce and T S Eliot all insinuate, lies at the heart ...

Steve Richards’s new book is an engaging survey of modern prime ministers. These leaders – from Harold Wilson to Theresa May, whose defenestration is alluded to in skilful late additions – qualify as ...