Frank Dikötter: Number Two Capitalist Roader - Deng Xiaoping: A Revolutionary Life by Alexander V Pantsov & Steven I Levine ...

Byron Rogers begins this charming and deftly written book about R S Thomas with a meditation on the question which ought to keep literary biographers awake at night: Why bother? Thomas himself put the ...

In the essays known as the Federalist Papers, published in 1787–8, the American statesman James Madison deplored ‘the blunders of our governments’. What, he asked, ‘are all the repealing, explaining ...

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 ...

The Scapegoat is Sophia Nikolaidou’s first book to be translated into English, despite her considerable literary reputation in Greece. It opens with the death of an American journalist as he is ...

Over 150 years after her birth, 109 years after mounting the British throne alongside her husband, George V, sixty-six years after her death, Mary of Teck has gone viral. Until the publication last ...

The forbears whom Evelyn Waugh affectionately described in his unfinished autobiography A Little Leaning were professional men as far back as the eye could see: clergymen (mostly Scotch divines in the ...

Brutal killings in London’s East End provide both the curtain raiser and final act for Judith Flanders’s insightful and dramatic staging of the story of Victorian Britain’s love–hate relationship with ...

Consider Hugh Trevor-Roper’s description in The Mind of Adolf Hitler of the European cultural order we would have grown up with if the Panzers had prevailed in 1945: ‘The hundred million ...

Jack Yeats lived his life in the shadow of his elder brother, the poet, the famous W B. Yeats, who was to become Ireland’s greatest painter, was born in London in 1871, at Fitzroy Road, Primrose Hill, ...

Miranda Seymour: Corners of Foreign Fields - British Embassies: Their Diplomatic and Architectural History by James Stourton ...

Ammonites and Leaping Fish is a title as engaging as I suspect the author, Penelope Lively, to be. Born in Cairo in 1933, she was a typical upper-class English child of those times. Her father was a ...