A telling French phrase to describe a girl who has lost her virginity is elle a vu le loup (‘she has seen the wolf’). This is just one of the many delectable facts waiting to be discovered in Shahidha ...

I realised almost as soon as I began reading Norman Davies’s new history of the Second World War in Europe that I was not the best person to review it. In his introduction he says, without a blushing ...

It is almost half a century since the last full-length English-language biography of Jean Cocteau was published, and it has taken thirteen years for Claude Arnaud’s work finally to be translated from ...

Among the bombings that marked the beginning of 2017, one took place on New Year’s Day at the CasaPound bookshop in Florence, an outpost of the Italian neo-fascist or ‘alt-right’ CasaPound movement, ...

In 1971 Bernard Levin wrote an excoriating article in The Times about the lately deceased former Lord Chief Justice Rayner Goddard, a noisome piece of legal excrement who is said to have ejaculated ...

‘In my belly is an octopus and in it are God’s children. Living children. These are things I must not speak of.’ These are the startling words of a German judge named Daniel Paul Schreber (1842–1911), ...

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 ...

War reporters come in many types and guises (and degrees of honesty). John Hersey was at the peak of the profession during the Second World War, rivalled among Americans only by the GIs’ own ...

The far Left and the far Right have agreed about few things in English history, but one of them is the iniquity of the Revolution of 1688–9, which mainstream opinion credits with the emergence of ...

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 ...

THIS TOPICAL BOOK should be compulsory reading for all immigration officials and politicians eager to sound off on one of the most emotive issues facing Britain today. People on every side in the ...

LAST YEAR THE American historian Arthur Herman published a book on the Scottish Enlightenment with the subtitle 'The Scots' Invention of the Modern World'. James Buchan's subtitle is 'How Eknburgh ...