WHAT MOST PEOPLE remember about Magnus Mills - despite his being short-listed for the Booker and Whitbread Prizes - is that he used to be a bus driver. The poor man must sometimes wish he could appear ...

The opening premise of Tim Blanning’s attractive book is that there were three revolutions at the turn of the nineteenth century. More or less simultaneously, the Europeanised world experienced a ...

The idea that all of us have a self – essential, irreducible and inherently valuable – is something that’s accepted across social divisions, party-political lines and ideological differences. The mere ...

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 ...

Among Graham Norton’s guests on his final show of 2019 were the actors Tom Hanks, Matthew Rhys and Florence Pugh. Hanks and Rhys were promoting their new film, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, in ...

With much editing here and there, Graham Robb has produced a fine and eminently readable translation of Claude Pichois’s comprehensive life of Charles Baudelaire. Only for a fleeting moment when the ...

Happy families are, famously, not the stuff of fiction. The Cloughs, who are the subject of the prize-winning poet Lavinia Greenlaw’s second novel, are an ordinary, close-knit, middle-class family who ...

In the days following George W Bush’s ‘Mission Accomplished’ speech on a US warship just returned from the Persian Gulf, one might have been forgiven for thinking that the region in which the West’s ...

Born in 1940, Angela Carter has published eight novels including The Magic Toyshop (1967, John Llewellyn Rhys Prize), Several Perceptions (1968, Somerset Maugham Award), Love (1971), The Infernal ...

We people of the Anglosphere need to learn the peculiar use among German-speaking economists of the Latin word ordo (‘arrangement’), as in der Ordoliberalismus. The historian Quinn Slobodian’s ...

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 ...

This, Neel Mukherjee’s second novel, after his first won India’s equivalent of the Booker Prize, is a historical family saga centring on a political issue not consigned to history – namely, Naxalite ...