Edith Hall, a professor of classics at King’s College London, tried astrology, Buddhism, transcendental meditation, psychotropic drugs and spiritualism before discovering Aristotelianism as an ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Few people can have had more fun than Peter Lennon, working for an English newspaper in Paris. Lennon arrived in Paris from Dublin in approximately 1960, aged about twenty, and stayed for roughly ten ...

After Napoleon, Marie Antoinette is probably the most famous French historical figure in Britain, even though she was originally Austrian and he was Corsican. At an early age, however, both left home ...

From Michel Houellebecq’s Islamicised France in Submission to Lionel Shriver’s vision of an autarkic United States in The Mandibles, the political disaster novel is in vogue and one only has to pick ...

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 ...

It is hard to understand why the reign of Henry VII has for so long had the reputation of being one of the most boring periods of English history. Perhaps it is because successive generations of ...

In 1962, Martin Heidegger went on a cruise to the Aegean. Going to Greece had not been an easy decision. Seven years earlier he had got so far as to buy train and boat tickets; when the enormity of ...

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 ...

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.