Darrin McMahon: Stargazing - The Invention of Celebrity, 1750–1850 by Antoine Lilti (Translated by Lynn Jeffress) ...

It is a paradox that the legend of the Foreign Legion should have such international currency and that, in this country at least, it should rest on a deeply ambiguous adventure and mystery novel, P C ...

In 1843, two years before her death at the age of seventy-two, Cassandra Austen told her brother Charles that she had been ‘looking over & destroying some of my Papers’, but was keeping ‘a few letters ...

Angry advocate of violence and sombre prophet of the anti-colonial struggle, Frantz Fanon was also a natty dresser and enjoyed a gin-and-tonic. A black, middle-class psychiatrist from Martinique, who ...

Perfectly timed for the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt, the fourth volume of Jonathan Sumption’s epic narrative of the Hundred Years’ War takes the story from Richard II’s death in 1399 ...

I n the summer of 1897, two aspiring Greek poets, who were also brothers, ended their brief tour of Europe by spending three days in Paris. For the younger brother, Constantine Cavafy, those three ...

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more. It wasn’t until 1825 that Pepys’s diary became available for the first time. How it was eventually decrypted ...

The central tension in this refreshingly contrarian book becomes apparent near the start. Discussing Woodrow Wilson’s dictum ‘the world must be made safe for democracy’, pronounced in 1917, Reynolds ...

I’ve become inured over the years to people telling me – in the same tone of voice reserved for inveighing against blood sports – that the theatre is a spoilt brat, a minor art, impoverished in ...

There has been nothing in English historical writing over recent decades to match the intensity of interest in the civil wars of the mid-seventeenth century. The foundations were laid a century or so ...

Recently the BBC television presenter Jeremy Paxman published a book on the British Empire intended to answer the question of ‘what ruling the world did to the British’ (as his subtitle put it). Of ...

Jonathan Bate has a true novelist’s gift for scene setting and story telling. He spots interesting details and connections overlooked by previous writers, allowing his lively imagination to play ...