On an autumn day in 1680, the 50-year-old Charles II charged Samuel Pepys with an unusual task. Over two three-hour sittings, one on a Sunday evening, the next the following Tuesday morning, the king ...

In the long history of Western culture, it is given to very few to have an entire era named after them. Socrates sits within Antiquity, Leonardo da Vinci within the Renaissance; even Shakespeare has ...

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 ...

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 ...

In the April issue of Literary Review Nick Holdstock ended his perceptive review of Michael Meyer’s In Manchuria by asking where the ‘great books about country life’ in other parts of China were. Now, ...

They might seem an incongruous pair at first, but historically speaking Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder are a natural duo for comparative study. When Bruegel entered the painters’ guild ...

For a French provincial town with just over four thousand inhabitants, Cluny in Burgundy boasts more than its fair share of fine stone medieval houses, towers from a generous circuit of former town ...

In the course of the 1830s, a Persian prince visited Europe and was shown all the technological marvels of contemporary Western civilisation. He was duly impressed, but in summing up his impressions ...

From 7 September 1940, London was bombed by the Luftwaffe for fifty-seven consecutive nights. More than forty thousand civilians were killed and a million homes damaged or destroyed. Other British ...

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 ...

Max Porter’s first novel, Grief is the Thing with Feathers (2015), was an ingenious debut in which a recently bereaved father and his two sons are comforted by Crow, an imaginary spirit animal based ...

Peggy Guggenheim, born in 1896, had a complex heritage and left a muddled reputation. Her forebears on both sides, Jewish immigrants to the USA, were astonishing people who rapidly built vast fortunes ...