Alan Taylor: Borderline Personalities - The Debatable Land: The Lost World Between Scotland and England by Graham Robb ...

‘Do as I say, not as I do’ applies to philosophy as much as any other discipline. The search for the Good Life (what the Ancient Greeks termed eudaimonia) does not presuppose a good life, or a ...

With close to five hundred records relating to his life surviving and the prospect of still more being found, Geoffrey Chaucer remains one of the best-documented premodern Britons. The commanding size ...

The forbears whom Evelyn Waugh affectionately described in his unfinished autobiography A Little Leaning were professional men as far back as the eye could see: clergymen (mostly Scotch divines in the ...

Jonathan Mirsky: Naked Truths - 1965: The Year Modern Britain Was Born by Christopher Bray ...

Following hard on the heels of April Blood: Florence and the Plot against the Medici (2004), Lauro Martines’s Scourge and Fire sees the author taking his story of the Florentine Renaissance on to its ...

BEEF-EATING AND Englishness have gone together pretty much since time and coolung - in the form of a spit over an open fire - began. In this smart, sharp studv of food nationalism, Ben Kogers takes as ...

The blurb of The Famine Plot claims that Tim Pat Coogan is Ireland’s leading historian. This is not exactly right, but it is true that Coogan’s works sell widely and have a significant influence both ...

J ames Meek likes to use major historical or political events as backgrounds to his fiction. In his most celebrated novel, The People’s Act of Love (2005), the action takes place in the aftermath of ...

At the start of his biography of Reinhard Heydrich, Robert Gerwarth, professor of modern history at University College Dublin, muses on the challenge of writing about an individual who is ‘repellent’ ...

In the heyday of Mrs Thatcher, arguments raged over what had gone wrong with Britain since 1945, and who was to blame. High on the list of suspects were the Conservative governments of 1951 to 1964.

In researching material for my book on the Waughs, Fathers and Sons, I came across the obscure name of S P B Mais many times, for over a long lifespan S P B had, at various junctures, earned his keep ...