The epigraph, taken from William Cowper, to Part Four of Jonathan Coe’s engrossing, labyrinthine Number 11 is crucial to understanding where Coe is now as a writer. It refers to one of the book’s ...

Ad Ilissum has published this exceptionally handsome volume in association with the Burlington Magazine, which is entirely appropriate, since both its subject (from 1909 to 1919) and its author (from ...

Tim Weiner is a reporter specialising in intelligence matters for the New York Times. His history of the CIA escorts readers through all the routine sites of left-wing indignation, from Guatemala and ...

Just before Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Gestapo and ruler of Bohemia, was, as the Irish put it, shot off, Walter Frentz made a colour portrait photograph. Hitler, anticipating further staff losses ...

‘Consider the cattle, grazing as they pass you by,’ Nietzsche asked his readers in his first major essay, ‘On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life’: ‘they do not know what is meant by ...

‘Mindfulness’ is due a backlash, surely. And it starts here. Sort of. The authors, both psychologists, and one an experienced meditator with a lifelong interest in spiritual matters, originally set ...

Since Goethe lived to be eighty-two, his life provides an almost unmanageable amount of material for the biographer. Matthew Bell cuts a path through this forest by offering an intellectual biography.

There is something magnificent about the ambition of Iain McGilchrist’s book. It offers nothing less than an account of human nature and Western civilisation as outcomes of the competition between the ...

It is a question thousands of examinees have had to answer over the centuries: what was the cause of the English Civil War? Marxists, rewriting history with their customary abandon, depict it in ...

At one point in Defining Hitler its author asks the reader the rhetorical question: why bother to read this book? For many writers this would be a merited act of authorial self-destruction. In Haffner ...

Though Jean-Michel Basquiat was a sensation in his lifetime, it was thirty years after his death that one of his pieces fetched a record price of $110.5 million. Stephen Smith explores the artist's ...

Bob Dylan has been ducking, weaving and obfuscating for so long – been the repository of so many people’s fantasies and theories – that it’s well nigh impossible now to tell where the truth about his ...