In the Penguin translation of Catullus two words are left untranslated. ‘Pedicabo et irrumabo vos’, writes the poet of his foes Furius and Aurelius and ‘pedicabo et irrumabo vos’ is how it stays in ...

What was a witch? This deceptively simple question has prompted fierce debate among scholars for many years. There are several possible sources of the word, including the Old English wicca (meaning ...

Ninety years ago last May, the world’s first black heavyweight boxing champion Jack Johnson appeared on stage at an Elephant and Castle music hall. The flamboyant Johnson exchanged comic patter with a ...

One of the great mysteries of history is what has sometimes been called the ‘Great Divergence’ and sometimes the ‘Great Enrichment’: the economic takeoff that saw Europe, and subsequently much of the ...

The usual perception of Richard Burton is that he wasted his talent. As legend has it, he was a Shakespearean actor who sold out to the movies and was prepared to act in any old rubbish for the money, ...

Sharon Olds doesn’t need my good opinion; her trophy cabinet is pretty well full. Her first book of poems, Satan Says, won the inaugural San Francisco Poetry Center Award in 1980. Her second, The Dead ...

The Making of the MAGA New Right by Laura K Field ...

Unlike Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping did not pretend to be a poet, a philosopher or a calligrapher. The Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping, in a mere three volumes, offer few hints about the person himself.

WHEN SOLZHENITSYN WROTE his great three-volume classic, The Gulag Archipelago, it had a huge impact, particularly in France. There, since the Second World war, a great part of the reading classes had ...

Ian McEwan is a stranger writer than he sometimes looks. Texturally (well, except maybe in the semi-farcical Solar) he’s a fastidious realist; and yet – as displayed most obviously in Sweet Tooth, ...

Michael Frayn has solved a problem for me. I am often asked to recommend a book that will get interested parties well into philosophy, and find myself at a stand because text-book introductions are ...

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 ...