Describing himself in his mid-fifties as ‘a wambling old codger’, T S Eliot was hardly cut out to be a night-time fire watcher on London’s wartime rooftops. Yet for several nights each week, as first ...

Clodia Metelli has gone down in history as one of the great femmes fatales of ancient Rome. Cicero shuddered at her ‘confident airs’ and intense ‘oxen eyes’ and jibed at her fondness for holidaying in ...

This year is the centenary of the Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act, which sought to halt the sale of titles by British governments. Stephen Bates, a Guardian journalist and social historian, marks ...

On 24 October 2019, the body of Francisco Franco, dictator of Spain until his death in 1975, was moved from one grave, near Madrid, to another site not far away. This act was accompanied by both ...

How can we live in a meaningless world? Is there any hope of happiness, when our existence is fundamentally absurd and we must succumb to ‘revolting death’? Should we even bother with life, or just ...

Jens Stoltenberg’s memoir of his time at the helm of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (2014–24) is partly a valuable addition to the historical record and partly a manifesto for the author’s ...

On page 510 of the published correspondence of John Updike, the author is making a new will, after filing for divorce from first wife, Mary Pennington, and a year before his wedding to Martha Ruggles ...

Auguste Rodin ‘haunted’ (his word) the British Museum from the first of his many visits to London in 1881. He was aged forty-one, and already a lauded and successful sculptor, highly attuned to the ...

The reason why the writer and polemicist Paul Foot has such an exalted reputation has always been a mystery to me. For almost four decades, this hardline Marxist was revered as one of the great ...

To attempt to write a life of Robert Walpole is to climb one of the highest mountains in biography. He dominated English politics for over twenty years, and established a model of government that ...

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 ...

Everything about this book suggests it is much more the biography of a celebrity than an author. An international aristocracy of writers, artists, photographers and politicians flits through its pages ...