David Peace is the William Faulkner of the M62. Like the great novelist of the American South, he has created a body of work centred on a relatively small ...

The tsarist empire was known in its heyday as the “breadbasket of Europe”, thanks to the exceptionally fertile black earth of its southern, mostly Ukrainian, provinces. When the Bolsheviks took over ...

Many people educated in anglophone cultures will recall their first, challenging experience of reading Chaucer. His language probably seemed baffling, even foreign, with its lack of standardization, ...

As the Palestinian-Israeli conflict scales new heights of ferocity and depths of misery, myriad scholars and polemicists continue to clash about its origins. The chief culprit, according to the ...

I toyed with reading Rose Boyt’s Naked Portrait: A memoir of Lucian Freud while sitting for an artist friend. A naked portrait reading Naked Portrait. I barely see the artist friend, other than when I ...

Public fascination with Adolf Hitler and his court has barely abated over the nearly eighty years since the end of his “Thousand Year Reich”. As Richard J. Evans points out at the start of his new ...

We begin in 1936, with a candle inside a glass “moon-globe”, which Gabriel Dax’s mother lights. It is a ritual important to a fatherless child, “signifying order and calm”. Soon after, the mother, a ...

In 1693, the diarist John Evelyn wrote in the Compleat Gard’ner that a “handsomely contrived, and well furnished Fruit garden is an Epitome of Paradise, which was a most glorious place without a ...